


from the rivers of our palms

by zihna



Series: the daemon 'verse [3]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemon, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-04
Updated: 2011-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-26 21:38:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zihna/pseuds/zihna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of daemons, and intercision, and souls, and how a ridiculously soft, trusting, naive telepath named Charles had an eagle daemon, and how an idiotic, stupidly fearless martyr named Erik had a tiger, and how the world feared them for it.</p><p> </p><p>HDM AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue: old men

**Author's Note:**

> Notes, thank yous, ect. [here.](zihna.livejournal.com/2927.html)
> 
> The beautiful art can be found [here.](http://xsilverdreamsx.livejournal.com/20682.html)

  
_Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow  
kind, perhaps in the nook_

 _of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed  
anyone. Here I have  
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back  
to rest my cheek against,_

 _your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.  
My hands are webbed  
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed  
something in the womb_

 _but couldn't hang on._

—Bob Hicok, _other lives and dimensions and finally a love poem_

***

from the rivers of our palms

  
[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/zihna/pic/00005g1b/)

  
prologue: old men

  
 _langley, virginia, 2002_

The doors slid open with a hiss, and the sudden outpouring of air was dry and brittle.

Magneto smiled thinly. “Bit of a shock, isn’t it?” he said. “You get used to it.”

“Good to know.” Charles straightened his collar and Iskierka chuckled softly from her usual place on the back of his chair. She was making fun of him.

 _Stop that,_ he told her. _You’re undermining my graceful poise._

His daemon shook her magnificent head, laughter rattling through her wings. _Right,_ she said. I’m _the one undermining your ‘graceful poise.’_

 _Oh, shut up._

“You have thirty minutes,” the guard snapped.

Erik waved his hand, a clear dismissal, and the man’s daemon snarled.

Unfortunately for the dog daemon, Aliyah’s growl was bigger, deeper, and far more menacing, backed by unsheathed claws and long, terribly sharp fangs.

The dog daemon flinched, her growl breaking, and the guard, Laurio, glared. “Watch it, Lehnsherr,” he warned.

Erik showed him all his teeth. “You first.”

“Erik,” Charles cut in. “The man’s only doing his job. Don’t harass him.”

Magneto shrugged carelessly, eyes wicked and sharp.

The guard muttered something derogatory under his breath— _fucking mutie, should just kill him—_ before stepping back into the plastic hallway.

Anger rolled in Charles’s stomach, and he forced it down.

The door swished shut, the hallway collapsed, and then Charles was alone with Erik in an island of clear plastic and white light.

Aliyah rumbled, padding back to Erik’s side, and he absentmindedly rubbed her ears.

“Must you cause trouble?” Charles said with a sigh, rolling himself over to Erik’s table. A chessboard—also plastic—was set up off to the side, and thick sheets of paper covered in Erik’s untidy scrawl took up most of the space.

Charles picked up a piece and raised an eyebrow. “This isn’t a real language,” he told Erik. “Really. I don’t—what are you even saying?”

Erik shrugged, and his daemon let out a low, pleased hum. “I’m remembering,” he said. “And yes, I know it’s not written in a real language. I did that on purpose.”

“You,” said Charles, leaning back in his chair, “are excessively paranoid.”

“Keeps me alive.” Erik leaned back in his own chair, studying his companion. From his side Aliyah murmured something private and soft, and Charles politely refrained from listening in.

Charles wondered what he was thinking about—he could find out, of course, but that would be rude, and Erik would know—and returned his sometimes-enemy’s gaze evenly.

They were old men.

Lines carved stories into their faces, veins spider-webbed in their hands, the weight of forty years pressed down on their chests. Charles’s hair was completely gone and Erik’s was vividly white, and between them they felt a sort of age-old ache, sharp, ancient pain softened and roughened over time.

It was familiar, and for now Charles was going to take whatever he could get.

Charles smiled. “What are you thinking about, my old friend?”

Erik shrugged. “Things.”

His tigress growled at him softly, nipping his hand. Magneto glared down at her, but there wasn’t any heat to it.

“You’ve heard the rumors, I presume,” he said.

The smile slid from Charles’s face, and he looked away. On his shoulder Iskierka shifted, uncomfortable, and made a soft sound in the back of her throat. He knew what rumors Erik was talking about. “Yes,” he said lowly. “I wasn’t aware that you had, though.”

Erik offered him a lopsided smile. “Mr. Laurio likes to gloat,” he murmured.

“I won’t let them give you the death penalty,” Charles said fiercely. Iskierka flared her wings and lofted from his shoulder, flying in tight, controlled circles around the room. “It’s not just, you’ve never actually outright _massacred_ anyone, you attack only when provoked first—”

“That is not the rumor I’m talking about.”

Iskierka dropped back to Charles’s shoulder like her wings had been cut.

“No,” the telepath said. “No, it would never happen. The government—the people— _I—_ would never allow it.”

Aliyah sighed and padded from her human’s side, circling Charles. She had aged too, since she’d let herself be dragged from the water all those years ago. Her fur, once strikingly orange and black, was now liberally frosted with gray and she moved slowly, less fluidly, like she wasn’t sure of the strength of her bones anymore.

(She was old, Charles noted, but no less dangerous because of it. She had teeth, and claws, and razor-blade intelligence. She was an old tiger, but the most experienced tigers were always the deadliest.)

Erik smiled. “We’re not afraid, you know.”

Charles blinked, startled. “You should be,” he said. “They want to—there’s talk of having you _intercised,_ Erik, don’t you understand how _serious_ that is?”

Something like old fire stirred in Erik’s eyes. “Of course I understand,” he snapped. “I know what it is. I’ve seen it done, or have you forgotten?”

“No,” said Charles, and Iskierka hopped into his lap so he could fist her feathers. “No, I haven’t forgotten.”

Erik calmed, gritting his teeth and forcing the sudden violence out of his shoulders. Aliyah paced, around and around. “I am not afraid,” he said, “of dying.”

“It’s not dying,” Charles said. “It’s _worse,_ they’ll cut your Aliyah away—”

Erik waved a hand, gesturing for Charles to stop. “I’m old,” he said plainly. “Intercision, death, it’s all the same to me. Aliyah and I wouldn’t survive the procedure, I don’t think. The shock would kill us.”

His voice was steady, and only someone like Charles, who knew Erik’s mind intimately, could feel the tremors there. Iskierka clacked her beak together and her eyes were wide and soft. She hopped on the table, scattering Erik’s papers, and inched towards the other man.

Aliyah stopped pacing and prowled to Charles, looking up at him with her fierce, fearless amber eyes.

“We are not afraid,” she said, and her voice was deep and lovely.

Charles tried to smile. “No,” he mused. “I suppose you wouldn’t be. You two have never had the common sense to be afraid of what could kill you. You’re quite happy to make martyrs out of yourselves.”

“One of our many flaws,” Erik murmured. “We’re old, Charles, and anxious, but we’re not afraid. And if we become martyrs for our cause,” he gave a broad, shifting shrug. “So be it. At least we won’t be forgotten.”

“Anxious?”

“For our people.” Erik began to gather up his bits and pieces of memory, written in a language only he knew, and his mind whirled, a hundred thousand fragmented thoughts spinning by.

Charles was quiet. The room—cell, it couldn’t be called anything else—was hot and dry, and he felt like his throat was coated in dust.

Erik sighed and Aliyah stepped closer to Charles, shifting in and out of his space, always in and out of his space.

“I wrote about it,” the Master of Magnetism said, after a heavy pause. He tapped a page with his spider-webbed fingers. “Here, I wrote about the last time.”

“You wrote down the Bolvangar Project?”

“Of course.”

“ _Why?_ I thought we agreed to hide it, to never speak of it again—”

“So I don’t forget,” Erik said. “I do not want to forget.”

 _The Bolvangar Project,_ Charles thought, and he fought down the urge to rub his face. Iskierka spread a wing to brush him comfortingly.

“You’re going to tell the world about it,” he said. “If they decided to intercise you, you’re going to have the Bolvangar Project exposed.”

Erik smiled, and this time it was a tiger-grin of wicked teeth. “Yes.”

In the control area, Charles could feel the guards and psychologists and legal personnel chatter amongst themselves, confused, surprised.

They’d never heard of the Bolvangar Project.

There was a reason for that.

Charles titled his head back and closed his eyes. Aliyah was so close to his hand he could feel her breath tickle his palm, warm and familiar and entirely too close.

 _Don’t,_ he wanted to say, but couldn’t because his own daemon stood on the table in front of Erik at eye level, staring him down and offering him a wing to stroke.

“How much have written down?” Charles murmured.

Erik looked at him with eyes frosted and clever. “All of it,” he said. “Would you like to see?” His mind tapped at Charles’s, gentle, welcoming.

Aliyah leaned closer.

Charles took a deep breath, and Aliyah leaned into his open palm, Iskierka brushed a wing down Erik’s face—

They burst into light at those points of contact, and it was like coming home.


	2. part one: left and right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a capture, an intercision, an angry tiger, and a visit.

[ ](http://pics.livejournal.com/zihna/pic/00003628/)

part one: left and right

 _Langley, Virginia, 1967_

  
 _***_

 _“Jaguar,” the Lizard called. “Brother Jaguar!”_

 _The Jaguar, whose fur was sunlight and moonlight and starlight all at once, opened his lazy eyes. “What?_

 _The Lizard stopped before him, out of breath and afraid. “Brother Jaguar,” he said. “The humans are coming to kill you.”_

 _***_

I.

“Raven,” Sirion whispered, and she felt his whiskers brush the back of her knee. “Hurry up. I don’t like this.”

“Coward,” Raven muttered, but she listened anyway, her fingers deftly flicking through file after file. Sirion growled low in this throat, pacing, and the shadows deepened in his fur.

“Hurry,” he hissed. She could feel his anxiety echo in her own chest and she covered his muzzle with a hand.

“I’m going as fast as I can,” she said. “We can’t afford to miss anything.”

Her daemon flicked his tail and kneaded the floor with his claws. “Where’s Frost? And Angel? It’d go faster if they were here.”

Raven shrugged. “It’d go faster if you’d help me, you know.”

Sirion snorted and shed his jaguar shape, hoping up onto the filing cabinet as a monkey. “Better?”

“Much.”

They worked quickly for several minutes, combing through dozens of files, occasionally dragging one out and tossing it on the floor. The room was dark, shadowed, and heavy with dust—some of these cabinets hadn’t been touched in years. Raven’s flashlight cast a watery beam, just enough to read the file names and make the swirling dust glow, alive, in Sirion’s fur.

Had they been anywhere else, it would’ve been almost peaceful, to work in silence and watch the dust play across each other.

And then they remembered why they were here, and what they had to do, and anger burned in the pit of Raven’s belly.

“How many more?”

“Just another drawer full,” Raven said, her eyes flickering to the door.

“Why can’t we just burn them all?” Sirion muttered. “It’d be a damn sight faster than doing it like this.” His monkey fingers brushed hers quickly and his fur was spiked with tension.

“It’ll be okay,” she said. “Frost’s keeping watch for us, we’ll be fine.”

The daemon made a deep, disgusted sound. “I feel so much better.”

A shrill hoot made Sirion start and he toppled off the cabinet, flicking into his jaguar shape to glare.

Emma Frost’s daemon swooped by, a blur of white, his feathers diamond-sharp and glittering, taking a swipe at Sirion as he passed.

The owl hooted softly, scolding, and settled back onto Emma’s shoulder with his feathers sliding and clicking against each other.

“We heard that,” Emma said mildly, and her daemon rustled his wings and flicked his head disdainfully.

Sirion bared his teeth.

Angel slipped in from behind Emma, clutching a thick file in her hands. She looked between Raven and Emma, who were staring at each other much like their daemons were (viciously), and rolled her eyes.

“If you two are done,” she said, “I’m ready to go.” She waved her file. “You have the ones you need, Mystique?”

“Yeah,” Raven said, breaking eye contact with Frost. Sirion growled softly and she nudged him warningly, bending down to pick up the files. “Behave,” she hissed. “We can’t screw this up. Remember who we’re doing it for.”

Sirion quieted, pressing against her legs briefly, and she felt him _remember_ and shiver with it.

“Ready,” Raven said, cradling the files close to her chest. Emma nodded and led the way out, her daemon flying ahead to peer down corridors and into closed rooms. Riptide was waiting for them, silent as ever, and he nodded to Raven as she passed.

Langley was absurdly quiet at three in the morning—Raven expected, well, _more_ out of the CIA. Twenty-four hour teams, constant surveillance, armed guards with snarling wolf daemons, _more_ than what the CIA had offered them so far.  
It had been almost pathetically easy to break into the base, even without Erik. All had only taken Raven copying a guard and a few well-placed globes of fire from Angel and the four mutants had been in.

Sirion flattened his ears against his head and showed Raven his snowy teeth, his fur bristling anxiously. “This isn’t right,” he whispered. “I don’t—I don’t like it, Raven.”

“Relax,” she whispered back. The fluorescent lights flickered, bringing out the subtle colors in Siri’s dark fur, revealing his spots. Out of all he forms he took, this one was Raven’s favorite. Sleek, strong, _beautiful,_ if only he would stay and never change—

Raven caught the thought before it could reach Sirion (or Emma) and stamped it out ruthlessly. She didn’t care that Sirion hadn’t settled. She didn’t. She loved him anyway.

She focused on Emma and Angel, running ahead, so she didn’t have to think about anything else. She wasn’t important right now. The mission was. They had to get these files out of the CIA, so that what happened in the north—

Raven’s stomach turned and her current form flickered, wavering blue for a heartbeat.

Sirion rumbled a reassurance but she felt the sickness and fear churn through him too, and his fur stood jagged on end.

“Almost there,” she soothed. She wished her hands were free so she could reach down and grab a handful of his fur.

“Yeah,” he said, but his eyes were far away.

“Shit. _”_

Emma turned around so fast Angel nearly crashed into her.

“What’s wrong?”

“We have to go,” Emma said tightly. Her daemon spun in the air, shooting past Raven and down the corridor, Emma hot on his heels. “They know we’re here. Twenty of them are waiting for us the way we came in and they’re calling in locals for reinforcements. We have to _move._ ”

Angel swore violently, tearing after the telepath, and Raven hastily followed. Sirion flickered into a hawk’s form, diving through the air, and brushed his human with the tips of his wings.

Riptide paused briefly to throw a whirlwind down the hall, tearing open doors and light fixtures and overturning chairs. His daemon spun above him in circles, creating another tornado, and they left the hallway behind them a shattered battlefield.

“ _Shit!_ ”

Emma stopped completely at a junction between to hallways, her skin hardening and crystallizing in a second. “We’re trapped,” she said.

“ _Trapped?_ ” Raven hissed, and though she would never admit it fear slid into her veins. “You’re a _telepath,_ how the fuck did we get trapped?”

“I don’t know,” said Emma, and her daemon flew in loops around her head, betraying her calm, collected diamond face. “This has never happened before.”

“There’s got to be a way out,” Angel argued. Her daemon, Quetz, loosed himself from her neck and whispered in her ear; Angel grew steadily paler.

Emma’s owl hooted suddenly, gesturing with his wings towards another hallway.

“He can’t feel any daemons that way,” Emma said, and followed her daemon immediately.

“Raven,” Sirion growled, dropping into the jaguar’s shape again. “I don’t like this, this feels _wrong—”_

“We don’t have another choice, Siri,” she said. “We’ve got to get these files out of here.”

He whined unhappily in his throat, his eyes wide, but she felt him steel himself, growing taller and unsheathing his claws.

“Okay,” he said, and they began to run, charging after Emma.

All stealth and subtly was abandoned now; the group tore down the hallways after the snowy owl, their feet slapping on the tile. Riptide paused occasionally to hurl tornadoes, wrecking the hallways and creating a trail of debris that might, somehow, hopefully, slow up their pursuers.

And behind them, growing louder and louder, was the roar of men’s voices, and the howl of hunting daemons.

 _We might get our wolf daemons after all,_ Raven thought, and abandoned her current form for her true one, using the sudden boost of energy to _run_ —

Sirion roared, the sound magnifying and bouncing down the hallways, and Raven hoped it would be enough to make the agents afraid.

Up ahead, Emma’s her gleaming skin threw wild, dancing light on the walls, and Angel unfurled her wings. The sound of buzzing filled the hallway.

The snowy owl turned violently, his wings straining, and Raven had a split-second to notice that his eyes were wide and frightened.

“Mortimer!” Emma cried, and then the hallway boiled white.

A thunderous crack dropped Raven to her knees and Sirion twisted on the ground, howling, as light and sound splintered around them.

It took Raven a few seconds before she could stagger up and let go of her ears (she noted dimly that her hands were bloody), and by then, it was too late.

The hallway was suddenly swarming with men in SWAT jackets and strange helmets on their heads— _like Magneto’s,_ she thought—and the four stunned mutants didn’t really stand a chance.

They fought anyway.

Angel spat fire and Riptide conjured devastation and Emma glittered, all razored edges, and Raven dove through shape after shape, big and small, anything and everything to throw them off.

Sirion roared, swatting aside wolves, dogs, and birds, his fangs flashing. A few wolves tried to pin him down but he _changed_ , snake-bird-lion-horse so fast it hurt to watch, and the wolves were no match for a daemon who could be anything he wanted to be.

Raven fought, just like Azazel taught her, and she felt bones snap and recoil under her feet. Her head swam and the world doubled, and she could only hold on to a shape for a few seconds, but none of it mattered, she had to _fight_ —

She lashed out and caught an agent in the face; his head snapped back, his eyes shock-wide, and he fell. His daemon howled, burst into dust, and then was gone. The man was dead before he hit the ground, and Raven felt _sick—_

 _No,_ she thought. _I can’t. Not now. Have to fight._

Sirion fell back into his jaguar shape and slashed and bit, and daemons burst into dust underneath his ferocious paws, their men falling, dead. He wasn’t nearly as guilty as Raven—his fear, his need to _live_ , to _protect her_ , overcame it.

Out of the corner of her bleary eyes, Raven saw Quetz lash out from Angel’s arms, spitting flame or biting with his needle-sharp fangs. Riptide’s osprey daemon dove with tornadoes following her wings to gouge at eyes and throats. Emma was devastating those around her, her skin too hard to pierce with bullets or fists or clubs. Her owl, his feathers diamond-edged, flew as high as he could above the seething mass, diving down to claw, shred, and batter his enemies.

Another man came at Raven with the butt of a rifle and she ducked, kicking his legs out from under him and trying to crush his windpipe. Other hands grabbed at her and she changed, scales flickering, and they drew their hands away in fear.  
She broke a nose, and then a wrist, and then some ribs, leaping and twisting through flailing limbs and claws.

Sirion howled her name, leaping over a dog and a lynx, struggling to be with her.

“Emma!” Raven screamed. “Angel! Riptide!”

No one answered, and she could barely see her teammates through the mob. Men pressed in on all sides, driving her back into a corner no matter how many she kicked down.

Emma’s owl tore a helmet from an agent’s head, and suddenly gunfire splattered through legs and arms and necks. Men screamed and the tang of blood mixed with stench smoldering skin.

Orders were frantically shouted, and Raven found herself backed against the wall. She swore and Sirion pressed close, his face twisted into an awful, terrible snarl.

Fear buzzed through him and Raven caught a thought— _they’ll do_ it _to us too—_ before he hid it from her with a tremendous, shattering roar.

Through the mob she saw Angel in a similar position, cuddling her Quetz close and spitting globes of fire at anyone who came near.

Riptide was cornered too and he couldn’t throw his tornadoes if he didn’t have _room_ —

Emma was only visible in brief, glittering flashes, her hands like claws shredding faces, flaying back skin.

“Take them down!” someone bawled, and Raven screamed, launching herself at the nearest man, determined to go down fighting, damn it—

She toppled to the ground with a needle buried in her shoulder and the strength pouring from her fingers. Her vision doubled, tripled, and Raven had time to see Angel go down too, fire still pooling in her mouth—

Emma whistled, shrill and desperate, and there was the familiar rush of Azazel bursting in—

The last thing Raven thought before passing out was _we’re next,_ and the last thing she saw was her Sirion roar and lunge, his fur turning suddenly, violently white—

  
***

 _“Tyger, tyger, burning bright,” whispered Man to the fearsome beast. “What immortal hand or eye doth frame thy fearful symmetry?”_

 _The tiger grinned, showing Man his gleaming teeth. “Not yours,” he said, and ripped out Man’s throat._

***

II.

 _Westchester, New York,_ _1967_

Aliyah prowled through the woods and paused, ears pricked, to taste the air.

The forest was still and quiet. She smelled only wild animals, wet earth, and the faint, week-old traces of the children.

Satisfied that she was alone and safe, she continued to move soundlessly through the Westchester countryside.

Patches of moonlight dappled the air, revealing the glint of a fang, the curve of a claw, the fur cragged in angry, bristling lines down her shoulders, the pale, limp ermine dangling in her jaws.

Aliyah was furious. Rage filled her mouth and echoed deep in her soul, her own anger and Erik’s joining at the center to flood out and hum down her fur like lightning.

She couldn’t talk to Erik—he was too far away, separated by hundreds of miles and a steady old ache—but she felt his fury roll like a growl low and constant in her chest, and it was comforting and familiar.

The pitiful creature in her jaws made a keening sound and twitched, her pale body exploding for a second with color, with _need,_ and she reached out for someone who wasn’t there. Aliyah squeezed the ermine gently, wincing at the tremors of _alone_ _too far so far oh so far away_ that shuddered through her. The ermine twitched and Aliyah let the anger grow, burn out the sadness and sympathy and the pain of being _away_.

Her jaws tightened.

The children’s scents grew stronger, nearer. They were close. They had to go a little farther and then Aliyah could go back to Erik, have his hands soothe the crags out of her fur and the ache from her chest.

The ermine keened again, twitching feebly, and the anger flared white-hot behind Aliyah’s eyes, mingling with empathy and pity.

At least _she_ had a human to return to.

“Hush, little one,” she said around her mouthful. She squeezed the poor thing lightly, trying to offer comfort. The ermine quieted, too tired to cry out again, and Aliyah continued walking, her vision narrowing into furious, white-lined tunnels.

Rage tasted like iron on her tongue.

How could someone— _anyone—_ do what had been done? She didn’t understand. All she knew was the rage, singing like metal in her ears, whispering for blood and violence and golden dust.

Her paws sank into the soft earth, scattering leaves, and she dug her claws briefly into the dirt with each step.

She was close. The children probably knew she was coming—she was protected against Iskierka but the ermine was not—but Aliyah wasn’t concerned. She wasn’t here to fight with them.

She was here to deliver a message.

Familiar shapes pushed at the edges of her mind, tasting like metal and memory. The satellite dish loomed to the side, the plumbing snaked under her paws, and the wiring inside the mansion hummed and sang. She mapped out her old home in her mind and walked, her paws sinking deep into the earth to mix with a lion’s tracks and a lemur’s handprints and a little bird’s clawed marks.

It was strange, how well she knew the mansion now.

A sudden, sharp rage-pulse flared in her chest, tearing loose a growl, and fur bristled down her spine. She felt the pipes below her moan, pulled towards her, and the ermine whimpered.

Her eyes flashed, and she ran, bounding the last few hundred meters until she burst, claws outstretched and gleaming, from the forest onto the lawn of Charles’s home.

The mansion’s lights were on, but the children were all outside. She couldn’t see them yet but she smelled them, and their presence shivered down her spine. The metal all around her howled, vibrating, and she reflexively bared her teeth. She hoped the children didn’t want a fight, because today they would _lose._

She dropped the ermine and it shivered on the grass, too weak to move, and Aliyah threw back her head and roared.

“Children!” she thundered. “Show yourselves.”

Two eyes opened not far away. A lioness crouched in the darkness, her teeth bared in a snarl, and Alex stood with his hand on her shoulders.

Another growl rippled and Hank— _Beast,_ Aliyah thought—stepped forward, tall and ferocious in the moonlight. His daemon, a lemur, clung to his shoulder, her eyes wide and bright.

A shadow flitted over the moon and Sean dove, wings outstretched, his daemon a blue-silver whirl around his head.

“Why are you here?” Alex said roughly, and she could the discomfort in his eyes, the tightly controlled anger. “Where’s Er—Magneto?”

Aliyah growled at him lowly, warningly. “Peace,” she said. “I’m not here for you.”

There was a shift in him—straightening shoulders, curling fists, a violent, sudden tension in his lioness’s face—and light seemed to splinter from his fingertips.

“Why are you here?”

Aliyah tilted her great head, sinking low into a hunter’s crouch. The fury and the metal crashed inside of her, welled up through her paws and fangs and eyes, and she bared her teeth in a bloody, vicious tiger-grin.

“Intercision,” she said, and waited for Alex to understand.

  
***

 _The Lion was great and mighty, and he feared no one._

 _This, as it turned out, was a mistake._

***

III.

Alex stared at the tigress in front of him and felt fear spike down his back. Arinna crouched at his side, teeth bared, sunlight flaring in her belly, and he tangled his fingers into her fur.

Aliyah stood and glared, her fur cragging down her shoulders in bristling spines. Erik wasn’t with her, and the squirming, aching feeling of _wrong, so wrong_ twisted in Alex’s chest. He never got used to seeing the tiger without her human. It was just—just— _wrong_ , even if the Professor tried to soothe the discomfort out of him, tried to tell him that it was alright, Erik and Aliyah were like the witches and shamans of kid’s stories. They could separate and feel no pain.

Alex fought the urge to press Arinna against him until the shaking stopped. He couldn’t show weakness, not now.

He steeled himself.

“Why are you here?”

“Intercision,” Aliyah snarled, low and deep, and for the first time Alex tore his eyes off her and looked at the shadowy creature at her feet.

An ermine so pale it was almost translucent lay in the shivering grass, and its tiny chest heaved. Its eyes were closed and it made an awful sound, pitiful, _lonely_ , and suddenly Alex was very, very cold.

Hank staggered back, retching, and Alex saw Hesione, his daemon, bury her face into his blue fur. Sean hadn’t realized yet—he and Einín flew in their tight, controlled loops, watching the tigress. They didn’t understand.

Arinna choked on a growl, going so tight and tense at Alex’s side that she shook with it, and the light trembled inside them both.

“That’s—” she said, and the words caught in her throat. Her tail thrashed and a snarl, wild and wounded, ripped free and echoed in Alex’s bones.

He looked down at his hands and realized they were shaking.

 _Professor…_

“Is that,” he managed, asking the great tiger harshly. “Is that what I think it is?”

Arinna pressed against his leg and sickness and fear toppled through them.

When Charles told him that someone was prowling in the forest, Alex had expected Aliyah to come with lies and sweet words on her tongue, or rage in her eyes, and either try to recruit them one last time or to kill them all.

But this, _this—_

 _Alex,_ Charles said, and his mind-voice was tight. _Be strong, Alex. It’s alright. It’s alright._

 _Sorry, Prof,_ he thought, and Aliyah’s golden eyes sparked. _It’s really, really not._

“Yes,” said the tigress. Her voice was oddly gentle even though she was wound for a fight. Alex remembered, suddenly, unwillingly, that she had once been one of his teachers.

“That’s a—” Alex was dimly aware that he was holding on to Arinna so tightly he could feel it at the back of his neck.

“Severed daemon,” Aliyah finished, and now Alex saw the hot, terrible rage boiling in her eyes, just below her skin. He remembered that she was now his enemy, and his grip on his own daemon tightened.

“Severed—” he choked, and now Sean understood because he abruptly forgot to scream and dropped several feet. “You’re _cutting them apart?_ ”

Fury tasted like sunlight on his tongue.

“You’re _sick_ —”

Aliyah roared, the kind of roar that ripped into Alex’s body and flattened Arinna’s ears and sent birds fleeing into the air, that shuddered across the ground and made pipes punch out of the ground.

Before he knew exactly what was happening he was flat on his back, gasping for breath, and pipes and wires bit against his skin.

Arinna roared, startled, and twisted against her new restraints.

 _Prof!_

 _Hold still, Alex, I’m coming—_

 _No, stay—_

 _I’m_ coming _, Alex, just stay still. She won’t hurt you._

Aliyah growled softly, suddenly right next to Alex’s ear, and he jerked, trying to get away from her so he could let the light out.

“We,” she said, her fangs flashing near his face. He was painfully aware that, with a snap, she could bite his head off. “Did _not_ do this.”

Arinna snarled and Alex felt her heat up, energy surging under fur, and the tigress looked away briefly to pin the daemon down tighter.

“The _humans_ did this,” Aliyah snarled. “A government agency, operating in the north. They took a mutant, hardly more than a child, and they cut his daemon away from him.”

Alex’s stomach rolled.

 _Intercision._

Aliyah leaned in, very, very close. “We told you,” she said. “We warned you this would happen. When they come for you, you know why.”

She smelled like hot metal, this close, all blood and fire and iron. Arinna growled, fearless, and twisted against Alex. She itched for a fight, for revenge, and the sunlight skittered through her, through them, and he concentrated.

“Aliayh!” Charles’s voice was sharp and sudden, and it was enough to drag the tigress’s attention away from Alex. He watched her stiffen, all the way down to her claws, and he remembered the beach and how they had _howled—_

The light swelled in Alex’s veins and he focused, narrowing his concentration to the bands of metal wrapped around him. He felt Arinna do the same.

“Charles,” Aliyah said, and to Alex it almost sounded tender.

And then the roar of sunlight drowned everything else out and he let it go, tearing hot and bright up and up through the metal wrapped around him, blowing it into nothing.

Arinna burst up and pounced, slamming into Aliyah with all her force, howling and clawing like a mad thing. The tiger roared, lashing out, and Arinna was brave but Aliyah was bigger, was stronger, was half-mad with wild fury. Alex felt claws rake across his daemon’s face, and paws pummel her head, and he gritted his teeth against the onslaught.

“Arinna!” he shouted. A blow to her chest sent him staggering, gasping for air, and he saw Hank’s lemur leap into the fray, suddenly displaying her wicked teeth and long, sharp claws, and Einín dove from the sky—

Aliyah roared and roared, the ground around her churning, and she knocked the little bird aside hard enough to make Sean drop.

Arinna thundered back, teeth bared, sunlight gleaming down her claws—

“ _Enough!”_ Charles shouted, and everything stopped. Sean landed hard and scooped up Einín, cradling her to his chest. Hesione the lemur hissed at the tiger but returned to Hank, perching watchfully on his shoulder. Only Arinna stayed facing her opponent, her teeth bared in fury. Aliyah herself stood very still, every muscle in her body visibly trembling, with one paw raised and the claws hooked and wicked.

Her eyes flared, molten, and her tail lashed. All around them Alex heard the creaking and groaning, and he waited for her to strike.

But it never came, because Charles’s daemon Iskierka was on the ground between Aliyah and Arinna, her wings outstretched and her eyes bright and fierce.

Alex had forgotten how big Iskierka actually was.

Aliyah stared at the golden eagle for a long time, her body shuddering, and then she finally lowered her paw.

Charles breathed.

“Aliyah,” he said. Iskierka folded her wings but remained on the ground, watching the tigress silently.

“Charles,” Aliyah replied.

“You will not hurt my students.” Charles Xavier sat at the edges of the patio, framed by the light, and his eyes were hard and uncompromising. Alex felt a rush of pride for his Professor and the sunlight faded out of him. He didn’t need it anymore. Charles would take care of everything.

“I did not come here too,” the tigress retorted. “I came to deliver a message.” She swept a paw at the pale ermine that struggled in the grass.

Waves of pity and sickness washed over Alex and he grabbed his stupid, brave daemon’s fur briefly. She was warm and shaking under his fingers.

“You’re an idiot,” he murmured.

She didn’t answer.

“Your message has been received.” Charles’s voice was clipped, tight, betraying nothing. “You may go.”

For a moment, Alex thought Aliyah would refuse. She stood still, ears pinned flat to her head, claws dug deeply into the earth, and then she turned back towards the forest.

“You may keep the severed daemon,” she said. “You will do him more good than we—”

There was no warning. She was talking one second, facing the forest, and then she was reared back onto her hind legs, clawing madly at the air, and she _roared—_

Alex had never heard anything like it. He slammed his hands over his hears and the roar shredded through him, shook him down to the iron in his blood. Everything made of metal within three hundred feet blasted out, screeching, and Aliyah roared, leaped into the air, roared and roared and _roared—_

She landed with a thump, crouching into the grass, snarling deeply in her throat.

Everyone stared at her, shaken, and Alex felt weak, like he didn’t have enough blood in his body anymore.  
Her eyes glittered and Alex froze, and he felt fear knot in his belly. Arinna snarled.

Aliyah was beyond furious. The smell of heated metal grew, sharp and vivid, and all around them there was a low, constant groan.

Iskierka remained on the ground, staring at the tigress, and Charles smoothed his hair back into place. He looked as cool and calm as ever but this time Alex noticed (and pretended that he didn’t) that Charles’s hand was shaking.

“What,” said the telepath, and he was steady, “the _hell_ was that?”

The tigress straightened and the look in her eyes made Alex’s blood go cold. Even Arinna, stupid, fearless Arinna, paused.

“Charles,” Aliyah said hoarsely. “Charles, they have Raven.”

 

***

 _“Great Eagle,” said the Chief. “My eyes are weak; I cannot look into the sun to watch for enemies. Will you help me?”_   
__

_“Of course,” said the Eagle. “I will keep watch for your enemies.” And the Eagle flew to the top of the tallest tree he could find, and stared into the sun until he went blind._

 _***_

IV.

Charles stared down at the pale, half-daemon lying on the table and felt like he was going to be sick. Iskierka brushed her wings against the back of his neck comfortingly but she was just as sickened as he was. She could read this miserable creature’s mind, after all, and it was—

 _Pain,_ she whispered to him. _Unbearable, unending pain._

 _What’s her name?_

His daemon looked at him with her bright, sad eyes. _Esca._

 _And her human’s name?_

 _Sam._

 _Was he a mutant?_

Iskierka paused. _Yes._

Charles closed his eyes. _This is wrong,_ he told her. _This is beyond cruelty._

 _Of course it is._ He felt her tense on the back of his chair, pull her wings in tighter. _They cut someone_ apart.

 _Who is “they?” Why are they intercising?_

Iskierka hissed through her beak. Her wings flared, brushing against his hair, and she beat them, stirring up dust with each stroke.

 _There is no “why,”_ she said. _There is no reason to intercise. There is no reason to cut. It’s just evil._

Charles dragged a hand down his face, trying not to listen to the ermine’s pitiful whimpering. He was glad, for perhaps the first time, that he couldn’t read the minds of daemons. That was Iskierka’s power, and he didn’t envy her for it.

 _Aliyah thinks—_

 _No,_ Charles said. _She’s wrong. The government would never condone intercision. It’s_ wrong. _It goes against everything this country stands for. The people would never tolerate it. Look what happened to the Magisterium last century. They were destroyed because of their experiments. The American government would not be so foolish—or so evil—as to follow in their footsteps._

Iskierka shifted from foot to foot and pain rippled through them, phantom twinges where Charles had once felt his legs. For Iskierka it was more intense, coming in sharp stabs that rocked her off her left leg. They hissed in shared pain, and then Charles breathed and forced it away.

Iskierka could walk—well, hop—and she could fly, even though these tired her and she preferred just to sit on the back of his chair.

The pain was only an illusion, an echo, a memory, and Charles would do best to just ignore it.

His daemon ruffled her wings and looked down at the severed ermine sadly.

 _She will never be whole again, Charles._

 _No,_ Charles thought. _Can you put her to sleep, for a while?_

Iskierka closed her brilliant eyes and the ermine went limp, her tiny, heaving chest stilling so fast that for a moment Charles thought she had died.

 _Maybe that’d be kinder,_ he thought, and he forced it down, feeling sick. He wasn’t a killer, even if it was a mercy, in this case.

 _The severed do not live long,_ Iskierka whispered, and it wasn’t much of a comfort.

 _Let’s go see Aliyah,_ Charles said, instead of answering her. He maneuvered himself out of the lab, leaving the unconscious severed creature behind. Hank waited just outside, his face pale underneath the vibrant fur. His Hesione clung tightly to his shoulder, her eyes luminous, and she looked immediately to Iskierka for reassurance.

“Is it—” Hank tried to ask, and he couldn’t make himself say the word _intercised._

Charles’s eyes were soft and gentle. “She,” he corrected. “And yes.”

The lemur daemon shrank against the side of Hank’s neck and Hank recoiled, blinking furiously. Fear rolled off him in waves and Charles understood it.

To think that someone was cutting away daemons, leaving them _half_ —

Iskierka pecked his head, a warning. _Don’t,_ she chided. _Not now._

“Hank,” Charles said gently. “Iskierka put her to sleep. Can you and Hesione check her physical condition, please? I’m no scientist, unfortunately.”

Discomfort squirmed through Hank’s mind and his lips pulled up a bit, almost subconsciously. “Yes,” he finally said, because Hank trusted Charles enough, respected him enough, to do this with a severed daemon.

Charles smiled. “Thank you very much, Hank,” he said. “Do you know where Aliyah is?”

Hesione bared her surprisingly large, sharp teeth in a snarl.

“No,” Hank said, the tension rippling through his shoulders. “But she’s here. We can feel her.”

 _Yes,_ Charles thought. _I know what you mean._ “Thank you. We’ll find her, I suppose.”

 _Shouldn’t be too hard,_ his daemon murmured, and Charles knew what she meant. Aliyah’s presence in the mansion throbbed in the air, shuddered down their spines. They felt her circling around the edges, shifting in and out of their space, always in and out of their space.

After three years without her and Erik it was—

 _Disconcerting,_ Iskierka murmured. Charles twisted his head to look up at her, and the lights made her feathers shine a burnished bronze.

She was beautiful, he thought, and she carded through his hair fondly.

 _You’re worried about Raven,_ she said. At once all his clever constructions and compartmentalizing came crashing down, and his mouth was dry with fear.

“You aren’t?” he said out loud, because he didn’t think he could take the silence around them anymore.

She chirped softly, clacking her beak. _Of course I’m scared,_ she said.

“What if,” Charles started, and he couldn’t tell her how much the thought of Raven, his _little sister_ , intercised terrified him.

 _I know,_ she whispered, her weight warm on his shoulders. She squeezed with her talons, ignoring the pain the movement caused, and Charles reached up to stroke down her back. He swallowed, forcing down his worry, his guilt, and steeled himself.

“Let’s find Aliyah.”

Iskierka leaped from his shoulders to fly ahead, weaving through the hallways of their mansion. Aliyah wouldn’t be in the center area, with the children and the signs of a life her Erik had left behind. No, she was angry—furious, in fact, if her earlier display was anything to go by—and hurt, and when a wild animal was hurt, it would withdraw somewhere still and quiet.

 _The North Wing?_

“Your guess is as good as mine, my dear.”

With his daemon leading the way, Charles moved quickly through the hallways, leaving the warmth and light of his children’s presence behind to wade through the thick, dusty shadows of the lesser-used wings.

The light in the North Wing came in wavering, unsteady beams that grew and grew as the sun rose. Iskierka dove through them, her feathers shining gold, red, and dark as the shifting beams criss-crossed through her body. The carpets were thick with dust, making it harder to roll through, but Charles saw deep tiger-paws imprinted through the layers and pushed on.

“I’ll have to have this wing renovated,” he muttered. “It’s absolutely filthy.”

Iskierka snorted. _Only you, Charles,_ she said.

Thinking about renovations, turning his dusty, worn-down home into a school, did little to take Charles’s mind off the fear that had somehow seeped into the mansion. He could taste it in the back of this throat—his fear, the children’s fear, even Aliyah’s fear—and it tasted like the sea.

Something indefinable squirmed in his chest.

 _She can’t be much farther,_ Iskierka soothed. She followed the tiger tracks through the dust, and here and there their path was marked by a set of claw marks gouged deep into the walls or shredded old chairs or bent, twisted lamps.

Aliyah was furious.

And if Aliyah was furious then Erik, wherever he was, was furious too, the kind of deep, violent fury that shook Charles to his bones and sent missiles hurtling towards three thousand confused, frightened men.

 _Angrier,_ Iskierka whispered. _They’re angrier than that, even._

Charles swallowed. _I know._

They stopped in front of a closed door. If Charles remembered correctly, this had been a drawing room, once, back when people still visited Xavier Mansion. It hadn’t been used in a decade, at least. And Aliyah was inside.

Charles could hear her just inside the door, growling softly in the language of tigers. Iskierka couldn’t read her mind—Erik was wearing his damnable helmet, then, of _course_ —but she could feel the tigress like a black hole, pulsing raggedly at the edge of her sight.

“Are you ready, my dear?”

Iskierka lighted down onto the back of his chair. _Are you?_

Charles pushed open the door.

The drawing room was a battlefield. The furniture was overturned, the lamps unrecognizable, the wiring pulled clean from the walls. Fiery dawn light spilled into the room from gashes in the curtains and dust spun wildly, heavy and golden, between splintered wood and shredded chairs.

Through it all Aliyah prowled, her eyes fierce and glittering, jaws twisted into a terrible snarl. The metal rattled whenever she was near and she was half-shadow, half-fire, striped by the ragged light. Dust swirled at her paws and settled on her shoulders, and she made a deep, vicious sound in her throat.

“Aliyah,” Charles said. “Aliyah, it’s me.”

The tigress stalked forward, eyes glowing faintly. Her power shuddered behind her, making the room tremble.  
Charles swallowed and told himself that he wasn’t afraid.

 _She won’t hurt you,_ Iskierka whispered.

 _I wish I could believe that._

“Charles,” Aliyah said. She stopped far enough away that he wasn’t too threatened but he saw that her fur spiked aggressively and her sharp fangs gleamed. She looked _wild_.

“Do you feel better now that you’ve destroyed part of my home?” Charles couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice, not really, not even if he wanted to. He hadn’t seen her, or Erik, in three years, and everything pent up inside surged uncomfortably close to the surface.

Iskierka brushed his neck gently, a reminder. Normally she would talk to another daemon—conventions of society, and all that—but since she couldn’t touch Aliyah’s mind, and she didn’t speak anymore, it was up to Charles.

Aliyah’s tail twitched, a quick, nervous motion. Charles frowned. She wasn’t really a nervous creature, when he had known her. Perhaps three years of guerrilla warfare had changed that.

 _Or maybe she misses Erik,_ Iskierka said. _She’s alone, Charles. He isn’t with her. She’s probably worried that he was captured too._

 _I didn’t think of that,_ Charles admitted grudgingly.

Iskierka ruffled her feathers. _Of course not. You’re only human, after all._

The telepath studied the tigress, this time trying to look past the obvious anger. Aliyah was thinner than she had been before Cuba, her fur perhaps a little duller. She was still strong, still built like a predator, but there were clear signs of exhaustion now, of age.

 _I wonder what Erik looks like now,_ he thought to himself. Iskierka nudged his shoulders gently, a warning.

“Are you alright?” Charles asked Aliyah, and the tigress pinned her ears to her head.

“Fine,” she snapped. Behind her the wiring clattered against the walls.

Charles arched an eyebrow. “Really?”

She growled at him, more irritated than genuinely angry, and turned, continuing to pace through the wreckage.  
Iskierka shifted and Charles felt her _want_.

 _Go,_ he said, and she did. His eagle immediately leaped into the air, wings churning, and she flapped through the heavy dust to land in front of Aliyah with her huge wings outstretched.

Aliyah stared down at her, and the dust, turned red-gold by the dawn, floated in the sunbeams between them.

For several long, taut seconds, the two daemons stared each other down, talking in a language Charles couldn’t understand with their eyes and their faces and their bodies.

Iskierka looked away first.

“Why don’t you speak?” rumbled Aliyah. Her voice was low and Charles got the distinct impression that he wasn’t meant to hear. “I can’t hear you in my head, not when Erik has the helmet on.”

Iskierka looked at the tiger with her bright eyes mutely and beat her wings again, sailing back to Charles’s lap.

Aliyah followed the movement and turned to face Charles again and this time he saw more than her anger.

“Why doesn’t she speak?”

Charles ran his thumb down his daemon’s head. “She hasn’t spoken out loud for quite some time,” he said. He almost said since Cuba, but Iskierka nipped his thumb sharply.

 _Not now, Charles._

 _When, then?_

The eagle didn’t respond.

Aliyah padded closer and the lines of anger softened. Her fur lay flat on her shoulders and the metal fixtures in the room stopped quaking. Her face relaxed from a snarl into something more contemplative.

“Charles,” she said, and it was tender.

Iskierka chirruped, brushing against her human’s chest, and they both watched the tiger pad close, closer, until she was right next to Charles looking into his eyes with her own deep, wild ones.

She was too close.

Charles wanted to be angry. He wanted to be furious with Aliyah and her human—he probably would be, if Erik deigned to show up—wanted to yell, to vent three years of frustration on them.

But he couldn’t, because Charles remembered the weight of Aliyah’s head on his stomach, the feel of her whiskers against his cheek, her coarse fur underneath his fingers. He remembered talking to her, and to Erik, and the feeling of Erik’s hand on Iskierka’s back all the way through his soul.

He remembered breaking the taboo, and feeling the _completion,_ and he didn’t want to remember.

He wanted to forget.

Aliyah stepped closer and her breath tickled his throat. She was massive, he realized, truly massive, big enough to protect a traumatized boy from the horrors of his tormentor.

Iskierka made a sound in her throat, harsh, ragged. Charles sat frozen.

Aliyah was too close.

“No,” he said and his voice wasn’t steady, not anymore. “Aliyah, don’t. We can’t. The taboo—”

She scoffed and he saw Erik in her now, with eyes the color of old ice and a wry grin on his face.

“The taboo,” she murmured disdainfully. “I am a tiger, Charles. What do I care for the laws of mice?”

He closed his eyes so he didn’t have to look into hers and see what was there, what had stayed through the years.

Electricity, the kind that came from touching a live wire, shuddered up his hand and he _burned_ —

Aliyah made a sound like a sigh, tired, and Charles felt her turn, her paws thudding softly in the thick carpet.

“Erik will be here shortly,” she said. “Knowing him, he has Azazel teleporting all over the country looking for Raven. When they don’t find her, they’ll come here.”

Fear trickled into Charles’s gut, replacing the electric tingle of Aliyah’s touch. “Raven,” he whispered, opening his eyes.

The tigress was a few feet away now, solemn, regal. “You’re frightened.”

 _No,_ Charles wanted to say. _Of course not._ But this was Aliyah, and he couldn’t lie to her. “Yes.”

She dipped her head. “We’re sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what happened yet, but we never meant for her to get hurt. We’ve tried to protect her.”

Charles’s temper, frayed thin by stress and fear and three years of balled-up anger, flared and the feathers on Iskierka’s neck stood up.

“Then why did you let her get captured?” He snapped. “You know she’s impulsive—”

“She wasn’t alone,” the tiger cut in. “I told you, I don’t know the details. When Erik arrives, we will explain. Until then—”

“What? What can I do?” It came out harsher than he meant it, and Aliyah drew back a bit, ears flat. The sun was like fire in her fur.

“Gather your children,” she said flatly. “Talk to them. We might need reinforcements.”

“Reinforcements? You’re talking about going to _war?_ ”

Her eyes were cool. “Of course,” she said. “They’re _intercising_ our people, Charles. We won’t let it happen again, even if we have to kill them all.” And she turned and stalked out.

Iskierka made a soft sound and buried her head in the crook of Charles’s neck and he grabbed her, held onto her so tight he felt it echo back. Fear and anger swirled behind his eyes and his hand still tingled where Aliyah had licked him.

 _Again?_

  
***

“ _Brother Jaguar,” cried the Man, and he held a fistful of starlight. “Brother Jaguar, I have a gift for you.”_

 _“I do not want your gifts, little Man,” said the Jaguar, who had the sun and moon and stars in his fur._

 _Man shook his head. “Too bad,” he said, and threw the starlight onto Jaguar’s fur._

 _***_

V.

Raven came to in stages, in little flashes of fragmented time:

Light, bright and harsh, and the feeling of bumping down a dirt road:

A hand thrown across her stomach, familiar and limp:

Fur pressed against her face:

Pain flaring in spurts down her legs, her ribs, her face:

Someone whispering, then someone shouting:

Movement, hands tugging, a wounded, angry roar:

And then, quite suddenly, she was fully conscious and she sat up so hard her injured ribs screamed in protest.

“Sirion,” she choked, reaching blindly for her daemon. She didn’t know where she was, only that she hurt and Sirion _wasn’t there_ —

For a second panic threatened to drown her and she started to shout, calling for her daemon, and then a cold, rough hand clamped down on her wrist and she stilled.

In the gloom of the room—a cell, probably—Raven could only make out a few blurry shapes and gapped light filtering in high on the wall.

“Quiet,” someone whispered.

Raven’s eyes struggled to adjust and she saw Riptide raised a finger to his lips, warning her to be quiet. He let go of her arm, closing his eyes. There was a sudden creak and light flooded the cell—Raven screwed her eyes shut more as a reflex than anything, but it turned out to be a good move.

“Nah, they’re all still asleep,” a man’s voice rumbled. Raven kept her eyes shut, hardly daring to breathe. “You must be hearing things.”

“Huh,” another man said. Raven cracked her eyelids and saw two sets of feet and two daemons, a big, mean-looking dog and a lynx, standing against the bright light. Her captors, then.

The door slid shut on the two men and Raven slowly opened her eyes, swallowing nervously.

 _“_ Talk quietly _,”_ Janos whispered, holding a finger to his lips. “So they don’t hear.”

 _“_ Where’s Sirion? _“_ Concern for her daemon overwhelmed everything else—he was close, she could feel him, but she couldn’t _see_ him.

“Behind you.”

Raven turned fast, ignoring her howling ribs, and immediately found her daemon in the darkness. Sirion was curled in the corner away from her and a heavy color tied him to the wall. He was in his favorite jaguar shape but his fur, instead of black, was vibrantly, glowingly white.

Raven stared. She’d never seen him take that color before.

“Siri,” she whispered. She wanted to crawl over to him and bury her face in his fur but she couldn’t; her legs wouldn’t move.

“Mystique,” Janos said, drawing her attention _._ He held his hands out in front of him and asked, in fluid sign language, _can you sign?_

Erik had made them learn, a few years ago, so they could communicate if Emma wasn’t around. Raven carefully signed _yes,_ and then _drugged?_

 _Yes._ His hands whirled, too fast for Raven to follow. She frowned and said _slowly, please._

 _Ambush,_ Riptide spelled. _CIA was waiting for us._

 _How many?_

 _You,_ Janos said. _Angel, and me. Azazel got Emma. No time to come back for us._

Raven shook her head, trying to clear out some of the drug-induced haze. _Where are we?_

 _Don’t know. Tried escape—_ here Janos had to slow down again and spell out his words— _but they grabbed my daemon._

“They grabbed your _daemon_?” Raven’s stomach rolled. Touching another’s daemon—and violently—was _wrong._

 _They cut daemons,_ Riptide signed. _Taboo isn’t going to stop them._

Fear began to pool in Raven’s gut as the drug faded and she began to piece together what was going to happen. They’d been captured by the people who had intercised at least twenty mutants. They were mutants.

It suddenly wasn’t looking too good for the Brotherhood.

Raven swallowed, her mouth painfully dry. _I won’t show fear,_ she thought to herself. _I’m stronger than that. I’ve grown up._

If Riptide knew what she was thinking, he didn’t say anything.

Raven’s eyes adjusted to the gloom slowly and she sat up carefully this time, checking her surroundings with an escapist’s eye. They were in a fairly large cell made of steel and concrete. Weak light spilled under the doorway and from cracks near the ceiling. There was a toilet in one corner and a sink in the other. Angel was chained to the sink and her wings tumbled over her back; she was still unconscious, and probably had been since they were captured.

Angel’s daemon, Quetz, lay coiled in her lap. The men, whoever they were (Raven would bet _money_ on CIA), hadn’t made an effort to cage him or trap him like they had with Sirion. Apparently they decided chaining a snake was pointless.

Riptide was cuffed to the wall not far from Angel and his daemon was nestled in his lap. Her feathers were bent on one wing and she was almost unnaturally still. It hurt Raven to look at her.

Raven wasn’t chained but Sirion was (they didn’t know he could change shape, then, or they hadn’t really thought about it), and she longed to cuddle him ( _just in case_ ) but she didn’t.

 _Are you afraid?_ she asked Riptide.

“They won’t cut us yet,” he said, and there was something knowing in his dark eyes. “It takes time to prepare.”  
Raven frowned. “And you know this how?”

Her teammate didn’t answer. _We have a few weeks, at least,_ he signed. _More if they don’t have Silver Guillotine._  
Raven hugged her knees to her chest, trying desperately not to think of the machine they’d found in the first facility, far to the north. It had been a sleek thing, two mesh cages and a thin silver blade hanging between them and at first she thought it harmless, but Erik had _exploded_ and crumpled it to nothing.

And if Erik was scared, she should be fucking _terrified._

It was later, walking through the base, that Raven learned what the machine was for. She’d been the one to find the daemon cages, the first to see the severed ones, pale, shaking, crying out for their humans.

She’d called for Erik then, and watched him gently open the cages one by one while Aliyah carried the pitiful, served things to their humans’ laps.

Even then the severed hadn’t been whole—as Azazel explained it, in harsh whispers, clutching his Elvira to close to him, they would never be together again. Intercision was permanent.

Erik—Magneto, at that moment—had carefully filled nineteen syringes with morphine, left one for each severed pair, and then quietly closed the door behind him.

Only one daemon had been taken, sent to Charles for proof. The rest had died, and Raven thought it must’ve been a relief, really, to just _stop_ and force it to end.

She swallowed painfully, trying to work some moisture back into her throat. She didn’t want to end up like that, a shadow, a half. And Sirion, pale and lifeless, crying out for someone who wasn’t there anymore—

“ _Para,_ ” Riptide whispered, and his tone wasn’t unkind. Raven noticed that his fingers were buried in his osprey’s feathers. He was scared too. “Don’t. They want you afraid.”

“They’re going to cut Sirion away from me,” she snapped, struggling to keep her voice low and even. “I’m allowed to freak out a little, okay?”

Janos shook his head firmly. “No,” he said. “You’re not.”

Sirion stirred, his paws twitching, and Raven broke eye contact with Riptide to watch him, worried.

 _“_ Mystique.”

Raven looked back at her teammate coldly, anger and fear and confusion spinning wild in her thoughts.

“Don’t panic,” he said. “Don’t show that you are afraid. They win, when they see you are afraid.”

She didn’t look at him, choosing instead to watch her twitching daemon. _I don’t want to be,_ she almost told him. _I wish I wasn’t. But…_

“Okay,” she whispered instead. “I won’t be afraid.” This time she did reach out to Sirion when he stirred, resting a hand on his face and stroking away some of the tension curled around his mouth.

Janos’s eyes were dark and unreadable, and if she had been looking, Raven would have noticed the way his hands trembled in his daemon’s feathers.

“ _Bien,”_ he whispered.

And then the door swung open, light pummeling into the gloom, and Raven threw up a hand to shield her eyes.

Three men, two in suits and one in a lab coat, stood in the doorway and their daemons stared at her. The doctor’s daemon was a lizard, vibrant blue, and she frightened Raven, just a little.

 _Don’t show fear,_ she thought, and schooled her face into blankness, fisting Sirion’s soft white fur.

The doctor smiled, and it was cold. “Hello,” he said. “Welcome to the Bolvangar Project.”

 

***

 _“Do you miss it?” The Sparrow asked the Eagle. “Your sight, I mean.”_

 _The Eagle rustled his wings and remained facing the sun, even though he couldn’t see the Chief’s enemies coming anymore._

 _“No,” he said. “I don’t miss it at all.”_

***

VI.

Erik arrived just before dusk, on the front lawn, and the entire mansion shook with his sudden presence.

Charles leaned back in his chair, watching Erik from the window, and waited. He’d been waiting all day, really, ever since Aliyah told him that Erik would come. He’d turned the matter over and over in his mind, trying to decide what to do, and Iskierka had flown endless, exhaustive circles above him even though it hurt her now.

On one hand, having a militant, battle-tested leader would double the chances of Raven’s safe return, especially since it was _Erik._ Charles knew his counterpart cared for Raven, as much as he was able, and that’d he do whatever necessary to bring her back whole and unsevered.

But on the other hand, Erik was furious, and his fury was _dangerous_. Aliyah was evidence; the entire day she paced through the mansion, rattling doorknobs and lamps, growling softly of blood and vengeance.

Charles had never seen her like that—even the night before Cuba she hadn’t been angry, only determined, focused.

The lawn was still a wreck from Aliyah’s arrival. She had mended all the pipes and wiring but the lawn itself was a mess of churned earth and gaping holes. Charles watched Erik and what was left of his team—Emma Frost and the teleporter—pick their way through the minefield, their heads bent together.

Frost was in her diamond form, her mind closed to him. The teleported thought in Russian, which Charles barely spoke, so he was useless information-wise. And Erik’s helmet gleamed dully in the fading light, a shimmering blood-dipped red. He was a black hole, and it hurt to reach for him only to be met with the helmet’s smooth barrier.

Aliyah tore out of the house—through a window, if the sound of breaking glass was anything to go by—and bounded to her human with a roar, rearing up and resting her great paws on his shoulders.

Erik instantly tangled his fingers in her fur and leaned his head against hers. Charles imagined that she was purring, growling, whispering to him, and she leaned on him heavily.

 _Children,_ Charles called. At once Alex responded, all tightly-coiled determination and anger. Sean and Hank were slower to touch back; Hank’s mind was the color of fear and Sean’s the color of confusion.

 _Yeah, Prof?_ Alex asked.

 _Invite our guests inside, if you will. I’ll meet them in the dining room._

Alex was silent for a second, his thoughts a swarm of anger and understanding. _Okay,_ he said finally.

 _Thank you._

From his spot by the window, Charles watched his students—dear god, how _young_ they were, really, when it came down to it, barely settled—advance across the lawn warily, spearheaded by Alex and his Arinna.

His three students stopped several feet away from the three Brotherhood members, and for several long heartbeats no one moved.

Charles slipped into Alex’s mind easily, peering through his eyes. He felt Iskierka do the same, and together they watched Aliyah drop back to all fours and take her place at Erik’s side.

“Charles,” Erik said, and oh, he was just like Charles remembered, and he had to fight not to dive out of Alex’s head. “You can hear me, I assume?”

“He’s here,” Alex said. “He can hear you.”

From Alex’s left, Hank let out a low, rumbling growl, baring his teeth at the teleporter. Charles felt an irrational swell of pride. His students were brave, and unyielding, and _good_.

Erik canted his head to the side, his eyes shadowed under the helmet. Through Alex’s eyes Charles saw the vague smudges of his features and wished, suddenly, that he could see Erik with his own.

He crushed that feeling. Now was not the time.

Aliyah’s tail twitched, and Charles realized that Erik was nervous.

“Raven’s been taken,” Erik said softly.

Hank’s growled louder, ferociously. “You were supposed to protect her,” he snarled. “That was _your_ job.”

“She is not a child,” Erik—or Magneto now, Charles wasn’t sure—snapped. “She wanted to go. I won’t hold her back.”

“Come inside,” Charles said, working Alex’s jaws. “We have much to discuss, I think.””

Erik dipped his head and he and his people took a step forward.

“Not Frost and the teleporter.” This was Alex, reasserting himself, and Arinna bared her teeth in warning. “Just you, Magneto.”

If Erik was irritated by Alex’s disrespect and scathing tone, he didn’t show it. The teleporter, on the other hand, took a step forward, murmuring in some foreign language—German, it sounded like—urgently.

His daemon was great white wolf, bigger than Moira’s Zev, and her teeth were half-bared. Arinna snarled at her openly, daring her to attack, and the wolf didn’t.

Erik shook his head at the teleporter, answering back in German, and gave Emma Frost a long, sideways look.

She seemed to understand and nodded, touching the teleporter’s arm and striding back towards the woods. Her owl hooted once, an insult, most likely, and landed on the wolf’s head.

The teleporter watched Magneto for a long, heavy second, and then he too turned and followed Frost into the woods.

Charles felt like he’d just been offered a sort of truce.

“He’s in the dining room,” Alex said.

Magneto nodded and proceeded to ignore the children completely, striding past them like a tiger on the hunt.

Charles watched him go and saw Hank lash out, all coiled, beastly strength—

And then he snapped violently back into his own body, shaking his head with the force of it.

 _Alex…?_

 _Sorry, Prof,_ Alex said grimly, and Charles got the impression that he wasn’t really all that sorry. _Didn’t mean to toss you out there._

 _What happened?_

 _Nothing. We’ll see you in the dining room in a minute._

The telepath shook his head, clearing out the shock, and he bit down on a sigh. With some effort, he managed to school his face into practiced passivity and Iskierka carded through his hair, neatening it.

 _Are you ready?_ She asked.

It might have just been Charles’s imagination, but he felt a sort of pressure building in his lower back.

 _No._

He arranged himself at the head of the dining room table, folding his hands in his lap. Iskierka lofted from her usual position to settled on the table, her feathers a shimmering gold. He grasped her feathers once, briefly, drawing strength, and she brushed a wing over his hand as he settled it back into his lap.

They waited.

The door creaked open and in strode Magneto, tall and imposing and wound so tight Charles saw the tension ripple across his skin. Aliyah prowled ahead, settling down beside the chair at the opposite end of the table. She turned to look Erik and something silent passed between them, and Magneto tore his eyes from Charles and sat down stiffly.

Alex and the children stood in the doorway, their faces and minds half-way between determined and unsure.

“Go,” Charles said to them kindly. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

“But—” Sean started, casting Erik a mistrustful look. His daemon Einín hung on his shoulder, twittering shrilly in his ear.

“It’s quite alright, Sean,” he said. “Wait just outside, if you want. Erik’s not going to hurt me.”

Charles felt their lingering misgivings as they backed out of the room, glaring at Erik, but Erik didn’t seem to notice or care. He was watching Charles, and the shadow of the helmet hid his eyes.

“You’re not going to take that damned thing off, are you?”

Erik tilted his head, considering. “I’d rather not.”

Charles smiled bitterly. “I didn’t think so.”

They lapsed into silence, neither sure, exactly, of just what to say. The easy conversation over chess or scotch of three years ago was long gone, and it _hurt,_ sort of, a dull, throbbing pain somewhere below his heart.

He wanted—

Iskierka cooed and brushed her wings down his arms gently, and her eyes were bright and sad.

 _Charles,_ she said. _We can’t, not right now. Raven’s more important than what we want._

 _You’re right, as always,_ he told her, trying to smile. His face felt slack, frozen. He lifted his eyes to look deep into Erik’s shadows, trying to find the glimmers of blue he knew were there.

“What happened to Raven,” he said, and, if possible, his old friend tensed further. Aliyah growled, low and furious in her throat, and the lights rattled.

“She was captured,” Erik began, and the violence in his voice bloomed and grew until Charles could feel it knife-sharp against his skin.“Last night, with Angel and Riptide.”

Charles fought down the anger— _you let my_ sister _be captured_ —and breathed. He was calm. He was in control. “Where was she? What was she doing?”

Erik made a sound, inarticulate, and Charles shook his head.

“No,” he said as patiently as he could manage. “Tell me, from the beginning. I can’t help you unless I know.”

The leader of the Brotherhood leaned back in his chair, and the helmet cast deeper shadows. “Fine,” he growled. “Three days ago, we were Alaska. An informant told me there was a mutant testing facility there, two hundred miles north of Anchorage. We all went to shut it down.”

 _And by shut it down, he means destroy,_ Charles thought.

“We found the usual experiments,” Erik continued, and the violence around them grew. “And then Raven found the severed ones.”

“ _Raven_ found—”

“The severed daemons,” Magneto said. “Twenty of them. _Severed daemons,_ Charles, I haven’t seen anything like that since—”

Aliyah snarled softly, abortively, and one of Erik’s hands dropped out of sight, presumably to tangle in her fur. Everything metal rattled hard, cracking against the walls, the floors. Even Charles’s chair quaked, fine, delicate vibrations shuddering his bones.

“The scientists kept records,” Erik said quietly. “The mutant ‘problem,’ they said, could be fixed with intercision. They’d been doing _research,_ for years, it looks like. Hundreds of our people, pulled and cut and torn apart.”

Charles felt sick. The thought of mutants—of _anyone_ —being cut apart for science was, was—

 _Oh, don’t_ , Iskierka cried, burying her head against his neck. Charles folded his hands over her back and held her, his great eagle, and he felt her shake against him.

“We destroyed the base,” Erik continued. The knife-sharp feeling of bloodlust seemed to slide over Charles’s skin, alien and powerful. “And gave the severed the option of ending it. I sent Mystique—”

 _Raven, her name is_ Raven, _she’s my sister, not your_ soldier.

“Riptide, Angel, and Emma to Langley, to collect and destroy all the information they had on mutants.”

“You sent them to the _CIA_?” Charles said, disbelieving. “Surely you’re not that stupid, Erik, that’s _suicide._ ”

Erik shrugged.

“You sent them to _Langley?_ ” For the first time, Charles allowed a touch of his anger, bottled up for so long, to seep into his words.

“I had no other choice,” Erik snapped. “What was I supposed to do, Charles, let them continue cutting my people apart? For being _ourselves?_ ”

“The CIA cannot possibly be involved in intercision,” Charles said flatly. “The government would never condone it.”

Erik laughed, and it was harsh and wall-shaking. “Three years,” he said. “You’ve tried to run this school of yours for three years, Charles. You’ve watched the news, read the papers. The humans _hate_ us. They beat and rape and kill us; most would jump at the chance to watch an intercision if it meant the _cure_ to their problem.”

Charles shook his head. “You’re wrong. Intercision is— it sickens people. It’s so _wrong,_ the people wouldn’t stand for it, no matter on whom or why it’s being performed.”

“You’re too trusting,” Erik spat. “Open your eyes, Charles! The world around you wants to kill you and you’re content to hide here and let them.”

“I’m not—” Charles began, and all of his elegant words, the arguments he’d rehearsed over and over when he couldn’t sleep, imaging this meeting, deserted him. _Blind,_ he wanted to say. _I’m not stupid, I’m not naïve, I’m not_ soft—

 _Charles,_ Iskierka whispered. _Focus._

 _Right._

“You’re wrong,” he said, as evenly as he could. Erik grinned, and it looked more like a tiger baring its teeth. Aliyah rumbled underneath him, violent, gorgeous, and Charles heard the unmistakable sound of claws sliding across the wooden floors.

“So the daemon I sent you isn’t severed,” he said. “It never happened. No one would _ever_ use intercision.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Charles said, through gritted teeth. “Someone cut that poor creature from her human, I do not deny that. There are evil, cruel people out there, but I’m saying the _American government_ is not cruel. They would never stand for it. If anything, they’ll have learned from the Magisterum’s errors.”

Erik snorted, subsiding, and the anger swirling around him cooled a bit, dove back under his skin. “The CIA,” he began, “keeps records on every mutant they’ve ever encountered. And they’ve encountered quite a few, these last three years. Not as many as they could have, I suppose, since Cerebro is gone, but a good few.”

“Records?”

“Names. Addresses. Daemon forms.” Erik looked away, and this time he didn’t even try to smile. “Identification numbers.”  
Aliyah growled, and she was the only indication that Erik was seething.

Something twisted violently inside Charles, and he wanted to reach out, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t, not here. Not now. Not ever again.

Iskierka comforted him briefly, and then she hopped back onto the table, spreading her huge wings for balance.

“I sent my people in to get that information out, to delay the intercision program for a few weeks at least.”

“What happened to them?”

Erik shrugged and tension rippled down his visible hand. “An ambush, Emma thinks. The CIA was somehow tipped off that we were coming, and they hid themselves from her. The hallways were blocked off. They tried to fight, but then Angel went down, and then Mystique. Emma called Azazel but he couldn’t risk getting through the mass of agents to get to our people.”

“You _left_ them?”

Erik’s face was unreadable, half in shadow. “Sacrifices had to be made at the time,” he said. “We’re at war. I intend to tear the country apart to find them, Charles. I won’t leave them, leave _her_ , to be torn in half.”

Charles looked away. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. With the seven of us, we can find your sister faster.”

Charles closed his eyes. Of course he was going to agree. It was _Raven,_ and she was still his sister for all he hadn’t seen her in three years. He’d agree anyway, because someone was cutting people and their daemons apart and that was _wrong._

“Are you with me?” Erik asked, softly, gently. Aliyah rumbled and it was a question, an invitation. Charles opened his eyes and watched the sunlight stream into the dining room, turn Erik’s helmet deep, dark red.

Charles wished he could see his eyes.

Iskierka flapped to the edge of the table, stopping just in front of Erik, her eyes bright and solemn. She didn’t speak, because she couldn’t, not anymore.

Erik offered her his hand.

“Are you with me, Charles? This time, at least?”

Later there would be time to fight—to argue, to scream, to _give_ Erik everything that had been building _for three fucking years_ —but now was not the time. Now Charles’s children needed him; Raven needed him; the mutants needed him.

He couldn’t be angry, or hurt, or wild. That was Erik’s territory, and Erik’s alone.

He had to be Charles the leader, the calm, the collected, who had carefully built up a reputation in Congress as a fair, temperate advocate for mutant rights.

 _Iskierka._

His daemon looked at him, and then at Erik and his outstretched hand, and then at Charles again.

 _Iskierka, don’t._

The golden eagle sighed heavily, the sound escaping from her beak, and very tenderly, very quickly, she nuzzled her head against Erik’s hand before flying back to Charles’s shoulder.

Electricity— _souls—_ rubbed and tingled down his skin and he swallowed, forced himself to breathe.

 _Don’t do that again._

She didn’t respond.

“Yes,” Charles said out loud. “Yes, I am with you. We’ll help you find Raven.”

“The facility will be destroyed,” Erik warned. “And everyone in it.”

 _More bloodshed,_ Charles thought blearily. _So much bloodshed._ “I know.”

Erik nodded. “Good,” he said, and he stood, walking slowly, carefully over to Charles. He loomed above him and finally, _finally_ Charles saw his eyes, and they were vivid gray-blue and cracked open.

He suddenly forgot to breathe.

Erik studied him and the light slipped away, and he made a sound in the back of his throat half-way between a laugh and a growl.

“It’s good to see you, Charles,” he said softly, and then he turned and walked out, Aliyah padding at his heels.

Charles watched them go, his hand fisted tight into Iskierka’s feathers, and something welled in his throat. He bit down on it, choked it back, and his daemon keened softly, raggedly.

“It’s good to see you too,” he said to empty air, and no one answered.

 

 


	3. part two: dust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is experimentation, a revalation, a peace offering, a tempermental lioness, Dust, and a decision.

[ ](http://pics.livejournal.com/zihna/pic/000049tg/)

  
part two: dust

  
***

 _“What have you done to me?” Jaguar roared, and his voice shook the trees. His beautiful night-black fur had been turned white by Man’s stardust, and one by one the sun and the stars in his fur died, leaving only the moon and black scars._

 _Man smiled, for he was cruel and triumphant. “Now you can’t hide from me,” Man said, and raised his spear to kill the Jaguar._

 _***_

I.

“Stand here,” the scientist ordered, gesturing at the scale. His daemon blinked her beady eyes and Raven fought the urge to lash out, pressing her hand into Sirion’s snowy head instead of the side of the scientist’s face.

The scientist looked up from his charts, blinking, and something sour crept into his expression. His lips thinned and his daemon, a blue speckled lizard, blinked slowly.

The scientist made an impatient sound. “Stand on the scale,” he repeated. “Or I’ll have Mr. Peters here make you.”

Behind the scientist, one of her two suited guards stared at her impassively. His daemon was a wolf and she showed Raven her sharp teeth.

Sirion growled back, fearless, and Raven felt him quiver against her leg.

In the hours since he’d woken up, they’d been dragged through the facility nearly a dozen times for various “tests;” blood tests, measurements, X-Rays, and all sorts of other loud, clanking things that left the taste of metal in her mouth and her head spinning.

They hadn’t ask her to show them her power yet, but Raven couldn’t help but feel that it wasn’t far off. They had to know what she could do—she’d used her abilities, after all, taking out as many of them as she could—and she couldn’t figure out why they weren’t testing _that_ yet.

 _To make us afraid,_ Sirion murmured in her head.

She stroked his back briefly, a fleeting comfort, and gave the scientist a filthy look as she stepped carefully up onto the scale.

At once it began to click and whir, ticker tape spitting out of a slot near her head. She saw numbers—her weight, and then something else—before it was snatched away by the eager scientist and studied.

Sirion snarled thinly. Since he had come, he hadn’t changed his shape and the effect was fucking _scary._ He was in his preferred jaguar form, magnificent and spotted, but instead of black-brown fur with colors shifting inside he was blindingly, brilliantly white.

He looked bigger because of it, Raven thought. Much, much bigger.

The scientist ignored her daemon’s low snarling but the two guards didn’t; the wolf daemon bristled and snarled back and the lynx glared warningly, flattening her ears to her head. The guards themselves were impassive.

Raven was just a little mutant girl to them—not even particularly dangerous, either, really, because Angel could fly and spit globules of fire and Janos summoned tornadoes from his hands. She, in comparison, was just a shapeshifter, and they were big, strong men with guns and tranquilizers.

Raven hated them.

She knew this facility. It was almost an exact copy of the lab the Brotherhood raided in Anchorage, down the equipment. This place was, without a doubt, a place for intercision, and the thought sent terror-hate coiling in her gut.

She stepped off the scale, daring the suits to comment, and felt Siri press up against the back of her legs. His brilliant white fur rippled for a moment, and spots speckling him shifting, and he stared the wolf down with bright, fierce eyes.

 _Don’t be afraid,_ he whispered. _We can’t be afraid._

 _I know._

“Good,” the scientist said. “Very good.” He tilted his head, pining Raven down with a lizard-like stare. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Mystique,” she told him, because she sure as hell wasn’t giving him her original name.

The scientist arched an eyebrow. “Mystique? No, I don’t mean the ridiculous name you call yourself, I mean your _name._ ”

She stared him down, defiant. “My name is Mystique.”

The lizard blinked, clearly unimpressed.

“Don’t toy with me, girl,” the scientist snapped. “Tell me your name. Don’t make this harder for yourself.”

Sirion bared his teeth.

“My name is Mystique.”

The scientist hissed a breath. “Mr. Peters,” he said. “Persuade the girl otherwise.”

The suited man, Peters, nodded, stepped forward, and his wolf peeled her lips back from her teeth. He reached for Raven with a huge hand, and she knew that he wasn’t going to be kind or gentle about it, not at all.

“Sirion!” she screamed, and lunged forward suddenly, slamming into Peters with all the force she could muster. The man staggered back, startled— _weren’t expecting_ that, _where you,_ Raven thought viciously—and lashed out with his fist, trying to bowl her over with sheer force alone.

Sirion roared and leaped, claws extended, crashing into the snarling wolf and ripping at her with terrible, frenzied energy; the wolf’s angry growls turned to snarling, wounded yelps and snaps, and the two daemons rolled over and over in a blur of vivid white and drab gray fur and flashing teeth.

Peters yelled, swinging at her face, and Raven pushed his hand aside so that the blow only glanced down her shoulder. She kicked, putting as much mutant strength into it as she could, and she was rewarded with the _crack_ of ribs and Peters’s howl of pain.

“Help him!” the scientist snapped, as his lizard dove beneath his lab coat for cover. The other guard joined in swinging, catching Raven in the chest, and she staggered back with a gasp.

Sirion faltered, but only for a moment, and he hit the wolf with his great paws so hard she staggered, stunned, and sagged to the ground.

Peters tripped, shaking his head frantically, and Raven took the opening, springing forward to ruthlessly drive her foot in his throat.

He choked and dropped to the ground, fighting to breathe, and Raven rounded on the other guard fearlessly, adrenaline pumping and wiping away all other thoughts but _fight_.

This guard was a better fighter, controlling every motion of his body, and from the way the lynx circled Sirion, Raven could tell that they weren’t being underestimated. She curled her hands into fists.

She hadn’t bothered to shapeshift since waking—there wasn’t a point, really, they knew what she really looked like, and what she could do—but now she began to flick through forms, most of them young and harmless-looking, trying to see what could confuse the guard.

He wasn’t impressed.

The scientist was shouting out the door now, screaming for reinforcements.

 _We can’t win,_ Sirion said anxiously. He snarled and swiped at the lynx, but the smaller, faster wildcat danced aside and leaped fearlessly for his face with needle-sharp claws. _Raven, we can’t_ —

Raven ducked a punch, aiming for the guard’s stomach, but she wasn’t nearly fast enough to avoid the follow-through, and she reeled back with a split lip and stars dancing in front of her eyes.

Her mouth tasted like copper and her ears rang. She staggered.

Sirion couldn’t recover fast enough. The lynx was on him in a heartbeat, biting and clawing and digging deep into his fur, refusing to let him escape.

He and Raven cried out, and his fur rippled and roiled as he flickered rat-cat-bird-dog-snake, writhing, trying desperately to escape.

The guard tackled Raven and she kicked, hitting something—she heard a satisfying snap—but the man’s momentum carried him forward into her, and they went down _hard._

Her head cracked on the linoleum and she jerked, stunned. Sirion tumbled back into the white jaguar’s shape and lay limp, and Raven felt blood trickle around the back of her head.

The room swam and the guard’s weight _hurt_ —she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t _change,_ and her heart hammered in her ears.

The scientist, deciding that it was safe, came closer, peering down at the captured mutant. He smiled coldly and his blue lizard returned to his shoulder, blinking her glistening eyes.

“Now,” he said. Other guards were rushing into the room, pulling the man she had downed out. Their daemons rushed to the lynx’s aid, holding Sirion still, and hate burned in the back of Raven’s throat.

“What’s your name?”

Raven smiled at him, showing bloody teeth. “Mystique,” she said proudly, and then the world went dark.

  
***

 _“Tyger, tyger,” whispered Man, through his torn and gurgling throat. “Why?”_

 _The Tiger smiled, showing his bloody fangs. “Because,” said he. “Someone had to remind you just how small you are.”_

***

II.

Aliyah was so tense the air around her tasted like hot metal.

Her fur was jagged down her spine and rough to his fingers, but he tried his best too soothe out the crags anyway, listening to her growl low and continuously next to his ear.

“Aliyah,” Erik murmured.

Her muscles slipped and shifted under his fingers as she moved, prowled around him in a predator’s tight circle. If he hadn’t been his daemon, he might have been afraid of her.

“Hold it in,” he told her. “Save it. We can use it when we go and get Raven.”

She growled and circled, eyes gleaming, and her claws tore wounds into the earth, but she didn’t let the anger out.

“You’re an idiot,” she spat at him, tail lashing. “It’s been three years, you can’t even take off the damn helmet for him—”

“Aliyah,” Erik said sharply. “Now is not the time. We have other matters—”

“If not now, when?” She bared her teeth at him and fury surged underneath her fur, tingling through his stomach. The air felt hot, oppressive, and every scrap of metal with in two miles sang to them, vibrated just underneath their skin. “Three more years? Ten? _Never?_ ”

“It’s not your concern,” Erik said through gritted teeth. Aliyah’s anger echoed and fed his own and a hundred conflicting thoughts— _no_ and _yes_ and _i can’t_ and _i should, i want to_ —rattled inside the helmet, trapped, unable to tear free.

He bit down on them, held them in to feed his strength, and Aliyah snarled.

“Idiot,” she snapped. “Are all humans this stupid, or is it just mine?”

Erik bristled. “The choices I’ve made,” he growled, “were for the good of our people. What _I_ want doesn’t matter.”

She snorted, face wrinkled in a scowl. “Martyr.”

“If I must.”

The sound his daemon made was outraged and sad and understanding all at once, and he wanted to wrap his arms around his neck but he wouldn’t. Charles and his children were watching, no doubt; he could not show them weakness, or pain, or anything soft at all.

He had to be hard and painless today.

“And me?” Aliyah whispered, more to herself than to Erik but of course he heard it anyway. “What about me, Erik? What if I don’t want to be a martyr?”

Her eyes were fierce and amber, tinged with sorrow and old wounds, and Erik offered her his hand. “No one does,” he said.

“But you will,” she said, and it was bitter. “You’ll fight and kill and die, if you have to.”

Erik dipped his head. The helmet—Shaw’s helmet still, even after three years—was heavy. “Yes. If I must, I will.”

She roared softly, harshly, and leaped at him, pressing her beautiful face into his stomach. “I don’t want you to,” she said. The anger had left her now—her fur was spiked for a different reason. “I want—I want—”

“I know.” Erik let steel creep into his tone and strength flood down his fingers into Aliyah’s fur. “But we _can’t._ ”

“No,” she said dully. “I suppose not.”

When she pulled back, Erik saw glimmers of indefinable things swirling in her eyes, and he looked away.

“Come,” he said. “We have work to do.”

The leader of the Brotherhood and his tiger prowled through the woods of their one-time home, heading back for Azazel and Emma.

They didn’t speak to each other on the way—they didn’t want to, or need to. After a separation (it didn’t hurt anymore, the separating, even though it should if they were _normal_. Practice, Erik supposed, with a flash of old anger, made perfect) they didn’t speak. They touched, watched each other, and relearned how to move as one whole instead of two halves.

It was a process.

“So,” Emma said, as Erik entered the clearing where they’d set up camp. “What next, fearless leader?”

Erik let his face twist into a displeased frown. “We wait.”

Azazel shook his head and stood up, pacing back and forth, back and forth with his daemon at his side. “Waiting is not good,” he said anxiously. “We should be hunting our comrades down _now,_ before they are cut apart.”

Emma shook her head and her owl hooted softly, blinking at Azazel’s Elvira gently. “No,” she said. “They won’t be severed for a few weeks at least.”

The teleporter continued pacing. “You do not know for sure.”

Emma’s smile was knowing and a little bitter. “I do,” she said.

“How?”

Erik snorted and looked away, curling his hands into fists. Fury rose, white-hot, and he shoved it back down, bottling it up.

“You weren’t with Shaw then,” Emma said carefully. “It was before you and Janos, but in the ‘50s, Sebastian and I…”

“Experimented,” Erik spat, before he could stop himself. “On our own kind.”

Azazel started and stared at Emma, and Elvira bared her teeth.

Emma looked away. “You don’t get to judge me, Lehnsherr,” she warned. “I know about the camps.”

This time it was Erik who looked away suddenly, muscles bunching in his neck. Memories—

( _“this is what happens if you don’t obey, erik,” shaw whispered, and he pulled the lever down._

 _the man strapped to the table began to scream and scream, and his daemon howled—_ )

Azazel looked between the leader and the telepath, his face unreadable.

Aliyah growled at Emma’s owl softly, pressing against Erik. “We were forced,” she snarled. “You followed Shaw of your own free will.”

Mortimer the owl suddenly turned to diamond, and the moonlight streamed silver onto his hard, shimmering feathers, throwing rainbow-patches of light over the snarling tiger, the silent wolf.

“You intercised,” Azazel said, and there was a touch of violence in his voice, the kind that made the hairs on the back of Erik’s neck go rigid in anticipation.

“No,” said Emma. Her face betrayed nothing. “It never got that far. Shaw had neither time nor the money to create a functioning Silver Guillotine, though he tried, and he refused to do it by other means.”

“Tell him what you did do,” Erik snapped. Shudders rippled up and down his spine, through his fingers. The helmet rattled and shook softly on his head.

Emma shrugged uncomfortably. “Experiments. Shaw tested how much pain a daemon could stand, how much a human could stand, how mutations affected the daemon and vice versa. He created people who could go miles and miles without their daemons, like the you,” she paused to nod at Erik and Aliyah, “to see how far he could pull before the shock killed them.”

Azazel’s white wolf leaned against her human, licking his fingers, and Aliyah growled.

As far as Erik knew, Azazel had been born with the ability to separate from his Elvira. It was an aspect of his mutation, a mechanism to help him survive the shock of flashing all over the world without dying.

As for himself and Aliyah… Well. They adapted.

But the thought of Shaw making _others_ made Erik feel sick, and his tattoo throbbed with his heartbeat.

Azazel looked at Emma like he could never see her in the same light again. Erik frowned. That wasn’t good.

“You convinced Shaw to stop,” he said to Emma, loudly. “You talked him out of experimenting on mutants.”

Emma nodded. “Yes. We were being tracked. Someone—and I never found out whom—knew who we were and what we were doing, and after our base was raided, I convinced him to stop.”

Erik nodded. “And you hid his findings.”

“Yes.”

Erik paced, trying to think through all the thoughts— _guilt pain my fault, Charles Charles Charles_ —bouncing around inside his skull.

Metal sang to him, familiar and comforting, and he was sorely tempted to take out the old bullet and roll it between his fingers, ground himself, but he didn’t. He didn’t know who was watching.

“Where?”

“Argentina, actually.”

Erik nodded. That made sense. He’d tracked Shaw to Argentina, after all; the man had clearly spent some time there.  
Azazel said something to his daemon in Russian, still shooting Emma inscrutable looks. He’d known that Shaw was not a good man, of course, but it was probably just sinking in just _how_ vile the man truly had been.

 _Good,_ Erik thought. _It’s about time._

Aliyah didn’t pace with him, instead remaining crouched in the center of the clearing, her eyes two golden slits in the moonlight.

Something like fear began to pool in Erik’s gut. “I didn’t take Shaw’s file,” he murmured, mostly to himself, but Emma caught it and frowned.

“What do you mean?”

“From the CIA, before Cuba.” Erik shook his head furiously. “I had it—I was going to take it and leave—but Charles convinced me to stay and return it. When the base was destroyed, I left it there.”

“I do not understand,” Azazel rumbled. “The Americans have a file on Sebastian Shaw?”

“ _Yes,_ ” Erik snarled, and rage roared up, sudden and familiar, though this time it was towards himself. “And it has my fucking _testimony,_ I told them I tracked Shaw to the villa in Argentina—”

“Villa Gesell,” Emma supplied, suddenly understanding.

Erik didn’t answer, but Aliyah’s rumbling growl told Emma all she needed to know.

“They went there,” Emma said, and Erik couldn’t be sure but he thought that, under her diamond skin, her face was pale. Mortimer leaped from her shoulder and soared in a wide loop around the clearing, the wind whistling through his crystallized feathers, and it was then that he realized Emma Frost was scared.

“Shit,” Erik swore, and he paced. Aliyah crouched low and let a growl build in her throat. “The Americans _found it._ They found his research, that’s the only explanation.”

Emma didn’t say anything, but her looping, twisting daemon gave her away. She was terrified.

“Erik, that book—”

“It was a book?”

“Yes, he kept it all in the book, not the point. That book had all of _our_ information in it, not just the experiments. It had a record of every mutant Sebastian ever encountered, their power, and their daemon’s form.”

“I have to tell Charles,” Erik said. “How many mutants did you meet?”

“Dozens. Most were settled, too—that is, their powers were fully manifested.”

“Wait,” Azazel interrupted. “Powers and daemons—”

“Are connected, of course,” Emma said impatiently. She was watching Erik, not Azazel. “That’s not important right now.”

“The American government,” Erik said slowly, and anger and fear were at war in his chest. “Has Sebastian Shaw’s book of mutants and experiments.”

“Yes.”

“And he kept intercision notes in that book.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Erik said, and he sounded much fucking calmer than he felt. “We can’t waste anymore time, then.”

“No.”

He nodded decisively and stretched out a hand, calling Aliyah to him. He could panic later, in private. Now was not the time—he had a Brotherhood to lead and comrades to rescue.

“Azazel, go back to the facility in Alaska. See if you can find any information on other bases. Emma, Azazel will drop you off in Langley. Can you disguise yourself?”

She sniffed. “Of course.” Her daemon returned to her shoulder, calmer, sharp with focus.

“Excellent. Go through their minds, pull out any information you can. I’d prefer if you were subtle, but use whatever means necessary, understand?”

She nodded.

“Good. How long do Raven and the others have before they can be intercised?”

“Accurate measurements take about two weeks, so if the scientists don't want them to die of separation shock, at least that long” Emma said. At Erik and Azazel’s confused looks, she shook her head. “I’ll explain later, it’s a process. I’ll get the information.”

“As will we,” Azazel said, and Elvira bared her teeth. “Meet here?”

“In two days,” Erik ordered. “I will coordinate with Ch—Xavier’s people. Good luck. Don’t take unnecessary risks. Don’t go for revenge, not yet. That will come later.”

Both mutants nodded and reached for each other—Azazel hesitated before touching Emma, but he did—and then, with the rush of wind and the smell of cinnamon, they were gone.

Aliyah straightened and looked Erik in the eye. “Erik,” she said. “We need them to trust us.”

“I know.”

“We need them to save Raven.”

“I know.”

Her face was gentle and as soft as a tiger’s face could be. “You know what you have to do.”

His mouth tightened and worry—guilt, shame, fear—twisted inside his chest. “Yes.”

His tigress snorted softly. “Then do it,” she said. “Right now, Erik.”

He bowed his head—the helmet was _so heavy_ —and closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. “Alright,” he told her. “Alright.”

Carefully, with more hesitation than he’d ever had before, Erik hooked his fingers under the helmet and slowly, carefully, lifted it free.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then—

 _Erik?_ Charles’s voice was soft and familiar and painful all at once. Erik felt him, hovering on the edges of his mind, unsure, _afraid._

Erik breathed again, and Aliyah licked his hand to give him strength. “It will be alright,” she murmured.

 _Hello, Charles._

  
***

“ _Do you dream of seeing?” The Sparrow asked the Eagle. “Do you remember what it was like?”_

 _The Eagle remained facing the sun with his blind, useless eyes, and Sparrow saw that he was weeping._

 _“Yes,” said the Eagle. “I dream of it all the time.”_

 _***_

III.

After three years without touching Erik’s mind, having him _there_ suddenly floored Charles like a punch to the gut.

 _Erik?_ He whispered, nervously, because this wasn’t true, this wasn’t what Erik did—it was a mistake of some kind, a fluke. Charles needed it to be a fluke.

 _Hello, Charles,_ and suddenly it was—it was—

Charles couldn’t stop himself. He threw his mind out, diving deep and fast into Erik’s thoughts, wrapping himself in it, and he heard

 _Charles_

and

 _so sorry_

and

 _Shaw, Emma and Azazel are gone_

and

 _I need you to trust me_

and

 _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry_.

Noise thundered, welled up, burst from Charles into Erik like an atom splitting in two, all heat and light and sound. Erik accepted it, let it wash over him, and responded in kind, and the sheer _magnitude_ of it was a drug.

Charles couldn’t breathe. He didn’t think Erik could either, but breathing didn’t matter—he was beyond breath, beyond his body, beyond the occasional phantom pains he had, where his legs used to be. He was above it, and tangled into Erik, and a river of thought and feeling flowed uninterrupted between them.

Threads—a hundred of them, a thousand, a million—wound through them, and Charles felt them like he felt Iskierka, like he felt his own limbs.

Somewhere in the torrent of noise, he heard a similar reunion between Iskierka and Aliyah, an eagle’s joyous cry mingling with a tiger’s triumphant roar in light and color, scattering the dust of their long-dormant connection into the sun.

 _Erik,_ thought Charles, and he couldn’t think, didn’t want to think, he only wanted to feel—

 _Charles,_ hummed Erik.

He was dimly aware of Iskierka taking flight, shoving off the back of his chair and diving away, but he didn’t feel any pain as she tore from him.

For several seconds—or hours, or long, glittering days—neither spoke, or tried to speak. They didn’t have to. Charles examined Erik’s flickering thoughts, catching them and pulling them in, and Erik let him, though trepidation—and maybe more, but when Charles tried to chase it Erik hid it away—pulsed strongly.

 _You’re afraid._

Erik mentally snorted. Charles heard the odd, tinny sound of Aliyah speaking to Erik in his mind—that was one thing he couldn’t do, read a daemon’s mind—and the sound made his mental ears pop.

Iskierka said something, but it was lost in the howl of their bond.

The initial glow of connection dimed a little and Charles pulled back a bit, dragging his mind from the grooves of Erik’s.

He felt Iskierka’s sorrow, and he tried to soothe her even as he heard Aliyah whine at the loss.

 _Erik,_ he said, and Charles was himself again, in his own mind. Erik was only at the periphery, a swirling mass of wild emotion—pain, anger, guilt, worry—throbbing like an open wound.

 _Charles,_ Erik said. He hesitated—Charles felt it—and then sighed mentally. The weight of his thoughts sagged against the telepath, and however much he wanted to lift that weight, Charles wouldn’t, not this time.

 _I must speak with you,_ he said. _Immediately._

Charles frowned. _What’s wrong?_ Urgency roared at Charles’s mind, an ocean, and he closed his eyes.

 _Very well. I’m in the study._

Erik sent a mental affirmation and withdrew, dancing on the very edge of Charles’s tightly-controlled mind.

He didn’t put the helmet back on, though, and Charles supposed that he’d have to consider that a minor victory, or a peace offering.

Iskierka flew back in from the window and landed on the back of the couch, away from Charles, and her shoulders were trembling, each feather standing on end.

 _Iskierka,_ Charles said, and she clacked her beak at him.

 _Don’t._

Charles stared at her for a moment. The shadows in his study had turned her feathers dark, almost black, and her eyes shone fiercely in the gloom. She was angry. He could understand that.

There was a knock on the study door, heavy but with just a fraction of hesitation, and Erik’s mind was so close the urge to reach out and touch it was like physical pain.

“Come in,” said Charles, and he leaned back in his chair. _Iskierka_ …?

Wordlessly his daemon fluttered back to his shoulder, squeezing tight with her talons. Her weight was reassuring, even if her silence wasn’t.

The door creaked open and Erik came in, the helmet dangling loosely from his fingertips.

Aliyah left his side at once, choosing instead to prowl restlessly around the room, circling the corners, and the lights rattled in her wake.

Charles smiled blandly, and looked Erik in the eye. “What is so urgent you must speak with me at three in the morning, old friend?”

At the endearment, Erik’s face shuttered off.

“Charles,” he said stiffly. “We—the Brotherhood—have come across some information that you need to know.”

The telepath arched an eyebrow, trying to appear as cool and collected— _in control, I’m in control_ —as possible. “Such as…?”

“The American government, or whoever is running the intercisions, found Sebastian Shaw’s book.”

At the mention of Shaw, Charles’s heart sank.

 _Three years later and the bastard’s still fucking things up._

Iskierka hissed through her beak, mantling her wings. Aliyah snarled agreeably.

“And what is in this book?”

Erik’s mind flared, memory and thought mingling. Charles saw gray steel, knives, someone screaming—

“Details on each and every experiment Shaw has performed on a mutant,” the Brotherhood’s leader said lowly. The lights flickered, and the planes of his face—still so familiar—dropped temporarily into shadow. “As well as records on every mutant he encountered.”

Charles’s heart plummeted. “When you say experiments,” he began, and Erik shrugged jerkily.

“Everything he did to people. Intercision, in the camps, distance experiments, pain control, mutation testing. Detailed records of how to inflict pain on a person and their daemon and keep them alive while doing it.”

Charles licked his lips. He’d seen some of these experiments, from Erik’s memories, and while he didn’t know what they were at the time he knew now, and the sudden rush of bloody images, mangled lumps that had once been whole men and women, made Charles feel suddenly, violently ill.

 _Raven,_ he thought, and once again the worry gnawed in his chest. What if she was tortured like that—stripped of her strength and power and beloved Sirion? What if _anyone,_ human or mutant, was tortured like that? It was—

 _Unthinkable,_ Iskierka said, breaking her silence. _We have to stop it, Charles._

 _Yes,_ he agreed.

Erik ran a hand through his hair (longer than it had been, Charles noted, almost against his will) and hissed in frustrated anger.

“I led them to it,” he spat. “I told them I had been to Argentina, of _course_ they followed me there and found Shaw’s old hideout—”

“This book was in Argentina?” Charles cut in sharply.

“Villa Gesell, Emma said.”

“And you led someone there?”

“The CIA, Charles, the _CIA._ They have Shaw’s file, my testimony’s in it, _of course they followed me_ —”

Iskierka lofted from Charles’s shoulder and landed on top of the couch again, staring down at the still pacing Aliyah.

The tigress stopped, her eyes lidded and golden, and something quiet passed between the two daemons that Iskierka wasn’t going to share.

Erik seemed to calm, somewhat, and he got the anger swelling in his veins under control.

“It’s my fault the cutters have the book,” Erik said. “My fault they know how to—”

“Stop it,” Charles snapped. Iskierka cuffed Aliyah on the head gently. “You can’t blame yourself for all the evil in the world. You don’t even know if the cutters _have_ Shaw’s book.”

“Of course they do,” Erik shot back. “It all comes back to Shaw, doesn’t it, the hatred against mutants, the intercisions, the beach, what I—”

Erik bit down on whatever he was going to say so hard his teeth clicked. Aliyah jerked back from Iskierka, padding to her human’s side and nuzzling his hand, and the lamp next to Charles’s elbow bent backwards.

The Master of Magnetism blinked and turned away, glaring avidly at the wall.

There was something soft and painful in Charles’s gut, just below his ribs, and he did his best to ignore it because now was not the time.

“We don’t know if the cutters have the book,” Charles said evenly. “And I maintain that any branch of the American government is not nearly cruel enough—or stupid enough—to sanction intercision.”

 _They’d cover it up,_ Erik projected, and the telepath forced down a glare.

 _So ready to believe the evil of men,_ he said quietly.

 _So ready to let man’s evil slide by._

Charles smiled lopsidedly. “The old argument,” he said, and he felt _ancient_ all of a sudden, far older than he was.  
He looked all over the room, turning his thoughts (and Erik’s) over in his mind. He couldn’t look out the window because it was dark, he couldn’t look at Erik because of the knot growing in his stomach, and he couldn’t look at his daemon because she wasn’t looking at him.

Iskierka was watching Aliyah, who watched right back, and Charles couldn’t look at the two daemons because one’s daemon is one’s heart, one’s soul; one’s daemon is the truth, and from the way his own was looking at Erik’s, someone, somewhere down the line, was going to hurt.

Badly.

 _I thought we got over this,_ he told Iskierka, and she made a sound halfway between a laugh and a keening wail.

 _We’ll never get over this,_ she said, _and you know it._

“Where are your friends?” he asked, finally, unable to say anything else.

“I sent Azazel back to Alaska,” Erik said. From the color of his thoughts, he appreciated the change of subject back into business. “And Emma to Langley, to see if we can hunt down other facilities.”

 _Other facilities,_ Charles thought, and ice shuddered down his spine. “How many do you think there are?”

“Obviously more than one. With any luck, other facilities don’t have a Silver Guillotine—they’re incredibly hard to make, so actual intercision won’t happen.”

Charles felt worry and fear on the tip of his tongue, and apparently Erik did too because Aliyah licked Iskierka roughly, a quick, aborted gesture that left the eagle shivering and Charles digging his hands into the armrests of his chair.

“Emma says we have two weeks before they can intercise Raven correctly,” Erik said, and for the first time his tone was almost gentle. “I do not understand the mechanics of it, but tests have to be taken, things weighed. Emma will know more—she’ll explain when she returns.”

 _Two weeks,_ Charles thought. _We’ve got two weeks._ “That’s,” he said. “Good, I suppose. Better than I thought.”

Erik inclined his head. “We have time to plan, at least. We don’t have to dash in without one.”

Charles raised an eyebrow. “Would you? Dash in without a plan, I mean. You’re methodical.”

The other man looked Charles dead in the eye. “This time,” he said. “I would.”

And Charles knew why, too; finding the severed daemons and their half-people, stripped of their powers and souls, had triggered something in Erik, deep and primal and _furious,_ a remnant of his time in the camps.

It frightened Charles, just a little, because now he didn’t have any sway over Erik, any voice with which to whisper _the balance between rage and serenity._

Iskierka fluttered back to his shoulder, carding through his hair.

 _It’s alright,_ she assured him. _It will be alright, Charles. We’ll get Raven back, whole and safe._

 _Yes,_ he said. _But we’ll never get her_ back.

He was projecting again, because Erik—tenderly, hesitantly, like he was learning how to walk again—rubbed minds, sending a spark of _sorrycomfortokay_ skittering through the astral plane.

Aliyah rumbled, and it sounded more like a purr than a growl.

Charles closed his eyes, and kept them that way.

“So the cutters probably have Shaw’s book of experiments,” he said.

“And mutants. Where they live, what they can do, their daemons’ shapes.” Anger crept back into Erik’s mind and he withdrew, taking the comforting spark with him. _And it’s my fault,_ Charles heard him think. _If I had just taken the file with me—_

 _Don’t,_ Charles thought. _That doesn’t help._

Erik’s mouth twisted, and he rested a hand on Aliyah’s great, striped head. “No,” he said aloud. “I suppose not.” He sighed heavily. “Tell me, Charles, will you do whatever you need to do to retrieve your sister, safe and uncut?”

“Yes,” Charles said instantly, because he _would._ “My resources are yours. I, and the children, will do what we need to do to put an end to this intercision business.”

Erik nodded. “Good,” he said slowly, and Aliyah bared her long, sharp teeth. “Because I have a plan.”

 

***

“ _I am afraid of nothing,” the Lion roared, so great and loud that the mountains shook._

 _“Oh, really?” Said the Buzzard, flying lower and lower in the sky. “Not even of death?”_

 _“Not even of death,” said the Lion._

 _“Pity,” said the Buzzard. “Oh well. You will be.”_

***

IV.

Arinna snarled low in her throat, the sunlight streaming under her fur, and with a tremendous roar she let it out. Red light flared up and down the Danger Room and fire tore at the walls.

Alex felt the echoes of her anger and he latched on to it, letting build in his own veins, until light crackled underneath his skin and he _burned—_

The release left him shaking, and the Danger Room on fire.

“Jesus,” Hank muttered, slipping in with two fire extinguishers clutched in his big hands. “I _just_ replated the walls, Alex, couldn’t you have at least made an _effort_ to keep it together?”

His daemon Hesione swung off his furry shoulder to land on Arinna’s head, chattering a scolding in the lioness’s ear.

Arinna half-growled, shaking her head vigorously, and Hesione leaped to the ground and scrambled back up Hank’s shoulder.

“Woah,” Sean said, following Beast in. “Dude, you’ve got some anger issues.”

Alex glared.

Einín, a blue-tailed wren, circled Sean’s head in her usual swirl of energy and Arinna bared her teeth, leaking frustration.  
Alex understood how she felt.

“How the fuck are you guys so _cheerful,_ ” he muttered, dragging a hand through his short hair. “Do you not _realize_ who’s here?”

Hank and Sean shifted.

“Of course we do,” Sean started.

“ _Magneto,_ ” Alex spat. “Mag-fucking-neto is _here,_ and he’s going to fuck us all over again, I _know_ it.”

Arinna growled, her claws splayed against the stone, and the sound echoed in the bunker, unnaturally loud.

“We won’t let him,” Hank said, baring his own teeth. Hesione did the same, and it was always kind of a shock to see a tiny little lemur bare fucking _fangs._

“We already _are_ ,” Alex snapped. “You don’t get it, do you? Prof’s got this _thing_ for Magneto. He wants to fix him, or save him, or prove that he’s a good fucking person or something. He’s got a huge soft spot, and he’ll get hurt again. Remember last time?”

Sean winced. Clearly, he did.

“Exactly,” Alex muttered. “We can’t let that happen again.”

“What can we do, though?” Hank—fuck him for always being the reasonable one, who the hell had to be like that anyway—said. “Magneto’s got a valid reason to be here. If someone’s—if someone’s cutting daemons away, they’ve got to be stopped.”

“Of course they do,” Alex said. “That’s not what I’m saying. We can take out a couple of government whack jobs on our own; we’ve done it before. We can fight. But we don’t have to fight with _them._ ”

Hank shrugged, and Hesione stopped baring her teeth. “If he can get Raven out of there okay,” he said lowly, “then I’ve got no problem with him being here.”

Alex’s temper flared. “How can you say that?” he hissed. “After what happened last time? It took _months_ for things to get back to normal around here again.”

Arinna snarled, echoing his feelings, and Hank just shrugged again.

“Professor X is a tough guy,” Sean said diplomatically. “He can take care of himself. ‘sides, it’s not like Er—I mean, Magneto, is gonna take the helmet off anyway.”

Arinna pinned her ears back. “They don’t understand,” she muttered to Alex, and he glared at them, irrationally _angry_ and seething inside.

“When you open your eyes and realize what’s going on, I’ll be on the roof,” he said coolly. “C’mon, ‘rinna.”

His lioness muttered one last growl before following him out the door, tension rolling in her shoulders.

“They don’t see it,” Alex said, and sunlight bubbled in his blood. “They don’t _get_ it.”

“No,” Arinna agreed. “Probably not.”

Alex and his daemon stalked through the hallways, climbing up stairs and across landings, going higher and higher until they broke out onto the rooftop and sucked in cool, clear air.

The Professor’s mansion was far enough away from the city that the sky was open and thick with stars. Alex hadn’t really seen anything like it, before, and it was nice to just sit on the rooftop and _look_ at them, a hundred thousand constellations scattered like dust over the night sky.

Arinna lay flat and her claws skritched the roofing, grating on Alex’s ears.

“Not gonna pull those in, are you?”

She gave him a flat glare. “Not until _he_ leaves, no.”

“Didn’t think so.”

She snorted, her tail twitching madly. “Like you’re going to relax,” she said.

“True.”

Sullen anger coursed through his veins and Alex wrestled with it. He was so _angry,_ and it scared him. He was angry at Hank and Sean for not seeing, not understanding what Alex was trying to do. He was pissed at whoever took Raven, because now Charles was worried sick and Lehnsherr was _in their house_ again. He was fucking _furious_ with Magneto, for fucking things up in the first place and then having the balls to _come back_ after everything.

All of it rattled around inside him, mixing with the sunlight, and he felt like he was going to explode or something (which was a distinct possibility, by the way), which only made him mad at himself for not having enough control at all.

“I’m fucked up,” he told Arinna, and she laughed a growl.

“No shit,” she said. “We all are.”

“Us more than the others, though.”

She gave him a lion-shrug. “Well. It could be worse.”

Alex felt like his bones were being seared from the inside out and he laughed. “Yeah?” he said. “How?”

She bared her teeth. “We could be Erik and Aliyah.”

For some reason Alex found that really fucking hilarious, and he laughed and laughed and it sounded like he was choking. “’rinna,” he said, between wheezes. “We _are_.”

She didn’t laugh. “Yeah,” she rumbled. “I know.”

Alex sobered up, staring out at the stars and the forest and the hulking shape of the satellite dish. “What are we gonna do, ‘rinna?”

His daemon rested her head on her great paws. “I don’t know,” she said. “Survive it, I guess, like we always do.”

He snorted. “Good plan.”

They fell silent, sitting beside each other, and Alex tried to breathe and let go of his anger.

“Fuck,” he whispered. “I miss Darwin.”

Arinna rested her head in his lap, and her eyes were luminous and sad. “Me too. I miss Myra.”

“They’d know what to do, wouldn’t they? They always—” Alex stopped, remembered Darwin standing in the courtyard with red sunlight cracking his bones. “They always knew what to do.”

Arinna didn’t answer and he felt her anger, and her pain. “What happened to us?”

He laughed short and sharp. “We killed a guy, remember? And got our asses thrown in fucking jail.”

“Oh,” she almost laughed. “I forgot about that part.”

Alex stroked her ears, tugging the tattered one fondly. “You’d never taken a lion’s shape before that day, remember? You were always a fox, or a magpie, or that little terrier.”

Arinna nodded, closing her eyes. “I remember. I liked those shapes. They fit nicely, I guess. I could’ve been any one of them.”

“Why’d you choose to be a lion?”

His daemon opened her eyes and looked up at him, and the dusty stars were reflected in her eyes. “The same reason Charles’s Iskierka chose to be an eagle, or Einín a wren, or Aliyah a tiger, or Myra whatever she pleased.”

“And that is…?”

She nosed him gently. “You,” she said. “I’m a lion because of you.”

“Me?”

She nodded and licked his arm. “You.” She settled her head back on her paws and closed her eyes again. She’d look almost peaceful if it wasn’t for her lashing tail or her splayed, sharpened claws.

“That’s it? You’re not going to explain anymore?”

“Nope,” Arinna said. “You probably wouldn’t understand anyway; it’s a daemon thing.”

“A daemon thing.”

“Mmhmm.”

Alex said, dragged a hand through his hair. “What am I going to do, ‘rinna? I feel like I’m alone in wanting Magneto out.”

“Snapping at the others probably didn’t help,” she said, a little guiltily. “We got too angry.”

Alex laughed. “Jesus, we are Lehnsherr and Aliyah. All I need is a motherfucking cape.”

His lioness swatted him. “Don’t think like that,” she said. “We won’t end up like them. We’ll learn from their mistakes.”

“Good,” Alex muttered. Behind him, the door to the roof creaked open, and he could make out Hank’s tall, fuzzy form standing uncertainly in the shadows. “Starting with not being dicks.”

“Got it,” Arinna said. “If we’re going to do this thing, we have to be united, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” he told her, and turned to face Hank. “Hey,” he called. “You gonna come over here or what?”

And Hank came, his daemon darting ahead, and Alex pasted on a smile. He was going to fix this.

  
***

“ _Try it,” the Jaguar challenged the Man. “Try and kill me, little god.”_

 _“You’re too weak to win,” boasted Man. “I have taken the sun and the stars from your fur.”_

 _Jaguar bared his teeth. “I have the moon,” he said, “and that is more than enough to kill you.”_

***

V.

“Raven,” someone was saying, just above her left ear. “Mystique. Hey, Mystique, you gotta get up now, okay?”

“Charles,” she said thickly, except it came out as “Chls.” Her head hurt—no, scratch that, _killed_ —and her mouth felt like it was stuffed full of something dry and not very pleasant. What were they called? Cottonballs? “Fvem’remints.”

“Mystique.” Someone was shaking her shoulder now, hard, and she twitched. “ _Mystique!”_

Raven bolted straight up and regretted it immediately. Somewhere against her side Sirion howled in pain, and she felt like echoing him.

“ _Shit,”_ she swore. “My _head,_ Jesus, where am I, what’s going on?”

“We don’t know where we are,” Angel was saying. “But we’ve been captured by the CIA and we’re in a cell somewhere. We’ve been here for about two days. What the fuck happened to your face?”

Raven opened her eyes to glare at the bleary smudge hovering above her head. Sirion hissed and burrowed deeper against her side, and when she touched his head he flinched.

“Um,” she said. She tried to remember but it _hurt_ —she’d been called out yet again for tests, poked and prodded and weighed, and the scientist had asked for her name—

“Oh,” she thought, and probably said it out loud because the Angel-blur seemed concerned. “Um, I got into a fight with the guards.”

“ _What?”_ The pitch of Angel’s voice struck a nerve—Sirion whimpered, flicking into dog shape, and put his paws over his head.

“I—” Raven started, but she didn’t get to finish because the door swung open and sharp, splintering light stabbed her in the eyes and she groaned.

Three more guards—different ones—came in and manhandled Angel to her feet. Raven saw Quetz loop around her friend’s arm, hissing, and murmur something in Angel’s ear, and then she was gone, and Raven was alone in the bright light with the scientist.

(Where was Riptide? Was he being tested too?)

His daemon blinked and flicked her tongue, and Sirion, somewhat recovered, shifted back into his striking white jaguar shape, teeth bared.

The scientist smiled coldly. “Interesting,” he said. “I’ve studied dozens of your kind, girl, and I’ve never met one with an unsettled daemon. It… intrigued me, you see, because mutation manifests itself at puberty, when the daemon settles.”

“What,” Raven said, because she _hated_ the man and she was a little too woozy to be talking to him on equal footing, right now.

The scientist shook his head. “Mutation,” he explained, like he was talking to a little kid, “comes from daemons.”

This time Raven understood, and she blinked. “What,” she repeated, “the fuck are you smoking? _Daemons_ cause mutation? That’s completely wrong, it’s evolutionary genetics.”

The scientist arched an eyebrow. “Oh?” He said mockingly. “According to whom?”

Raven was almost— _almost—_ addled enough to say her brother, but Sirion bit down on her arm just in time and she choked back Charles’s name.

The scientist’s daemon blinked.

“It’s difficult for little girls like you to understand, I’m sure,” he continued. “But it has been proven, conclusively, that daemons carry the mutation in them, and pass them on to their humans.” He tapped a thick, worn leather book in his hands. “It says so right here.”

Sirion snarled, deep and low and violent.

The scientist ignored him. “Your daemon, for instance, isn’t settled; he’s mutated and cannot settle, therefore you have the ability to shapeshift.”

“It’s not his fault,” Raven snapped. “It’s no one’s fault. I was _born_ this way. My mutation didn’t manifest at puberty.”

“Ah,” said the scientist. “That’s what makes you so _different._ Most mutations do manifest at the moment the daemon settles. But you, _you_ , you’re special. You’ve always been a mutant. When we weighed you, your Dust was off the charts—unprecedented.”

Raven blinked, lost again. The man was talking about dust now?

 _Not dust,_ Sirion whispered. _I think he means_ Dust.

 _What the hell is Dust?_

 _No idea._

“You’re confused, of course,” the scientist continued. “Understandable. Dust is very newly known to us, after all, and I highly doubt that a mutant like yourself has heard of it, for all it clings to your kind.”

Raven bristled at the slur against her people. “The smartest people I know are mutants,” she snapped.

The scientist, once again, ignored her.

“Later, perhaps,” he was explaining. “I will tell you what Dust is. For now, all you have to know is that it is the source of your daemon’s mutations, and therefore your own.”

Sirion growled and pressed close to his human.

“Tell me, girl,” the scientist said. “If you could choose a form for your daemon to settle in, what would it be?”

Raven started, speechless at the man’s deeply personal question. Nobody just _asked_ that—it was kind of taboo, like touching someone else’s daemon. A daemon’s shape was for its human, and for no one else.

“This current form is rather magnificent,” the scientist continued. “A white jaguar, if I’m not mistaken.” His lizard blinked. “Is this your favorite?”

Raven didn’t answer; she glared defiantly, daring him to force her.

The scientist signed. “Yes,” he said, as if she wasn’t even there. “This is a very nice form. Would you like him to settle in this shape? I can arrange it, of course.”

Raven stared at him, letting all of her anger surge and coil in her eyes. “Intercise, you mean. Cut us apart, you mean.”

The scientist smiled. “Later,” he said. “But now I want tests. Stand up.”

Two new guards entered the room, armed to the teeth. Their daemons snarled and snapped at Sirion. Raven reluctantly stood—she’d rather not get punched in the face again, thanks. She felt like she had to be on her guard around the scientist.

He smiled and his daemon blinked. Fear formed a ball of ice in Raven’s stomach and she swallowed, reaching automatically for Sirion. He came into her touch and growled comfortingly, though she could tell he was just as scared— _cut away, taken away, my fault we can’t settle, my fault?_ —as she was.

“It’ll be okay,” she told him quietly. “Magneto’s coming for us. Don’t worry.”

“Worried?” Sirion muttered, and flashed her a cracking glance. “Who’s worried?”

  
***

 _“Why did you accept the Chief’s request, if it makes you so sad?” Sparrow wanted to know._

 _Eagle smiled. “Because,” he said. “All things must help one another. I helped the Chief when he feared his enemies, and he will help me now.”_

 _“Oh,” said the Sparrow. He thought for a moment. “It doesn’t seem like a fair trade.”_

 _The Eagle stopped smiling. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”_

***

VI.

Emma Frost and Azazel returned in the evening, out of breath and a little bloody, but triumphant. And as little as Charles cared for them, he figured that that kind of triumph was a good thing, considering the situation.

Azazel was the worse for the wear; blood darkened his pants and his Elvira limped, her face peeled back into a pained grimace.

“Just a bullet wound,” the teleporter said. “I got it out.”

“I’ll stitch it up later,” Erik said, eyeing the wound critically. Charles watched him, curious to see how he interacted with his teammates. “You’re not going to bleed to death?”

“ _Nyet._ ”

“Good.”

Aliyah gave the white wolf a gentle nudge with her nose and the wolf nudged back, clearly able to function. Emma delicately cleared her throat and her owl hooted softly, drawing the attention off the bleeding teleporter and onto herself.

The mutants sat at the dining room table, Charles and his children at one end, Erik and his people on the other.

On the table between them lay a dozen sheets of paper—manifestos, maps, battle plans, handwritten and typed-up notes.

Emma Frost had been very successful.

“Well, Ms. Frost,” Charles said stiffly. He still didn’t like her, much, but he had to admit that she had value at whatever she did. “What do you have for us?”

Frost smiled, and her owl preened. “The location of the facility,” she said. She stood and tapped a map of Canada. “It’s here, about ninety miles west of Vancouver, in the Rocky Mountains.”

Charles studied it. “It will be hard to reach,” he said. “But not impossible.”

“No,” she agreed. “Not impossible.”

“What’s the security like?” Alex watched Frost and the Brotherhood with blatant dislike written on his face, but he was _talking_ to them instead of fighting.

“Good,” Azazel admitted ruefully, rubbing his wounded leg. “Prepared against mutants. They learned from the other base.”  
Alex nodded, his face grim.

“How advanced is their intercision project?”

“They call it the Bolvangar Project,” Erik cut in. He was bent over the table, his helmet firmly in place— _appearances,_ he’d said to Charles—studying Frost’s findings intently. “It’s rather far advanced—they know what they are doing, and how to do it. There is no Silver Guillotine at the Rocky Mountains facility yet, but one is expected within the next few weeks.”

Charles’s stomach twisted and Iskierka stroked his back. “We’ll have to hurry, then.”

“Indeed.”

Charles reached for the papers, pulling them to him and studying them with a scientist’s eye. He left the maps alone—Erik could read them better, probably—and focused.

Iskierka fluttered down the table, gathering up all the notes and “findings,” bringing them back to her person and reading over his shoulder.

 _Subject: Male, twenty-three years old,_ Charles read. _Mutation: Flight. Daemon: Female, red-tailed hawk. Onset of mutation: age thirteen, two days after daemon settled. Dust: positive. Intercised: died from shock._

 _Subject: Female, nineteen years old. Mutation: Speaks with animals. Daemon: Male, terrier dog. Onset of mutation: age fourteen, three days after settling. Dust: positive. Intercision: died from shock._

 _Subject: Male, twenty-six. Mutation: Telekinesis. Daemon: Female, lioness. Onset of mutation: Age twelve, day of settling. Dust: positive. Intercision: survived a week, died from shock._

Charles read on and on, and he felt _ill_ —who could _do_ this, could methodically and unfeelingly write down lives and deaths and intercisions like they were nothing?

He pushed the papers away. “What,” he said, his voice hoarse, “the _hell_ are they trying to do? What’s this nonsense about Dust and daemon settling and the onset of powers?”

Erik shrugged, looking to Frost.

She shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “Shaw fancied himself a scientist,” she began. Her daemon was perfectly still on her shoulder, his narrowed into vivid, unblinking slits. “He liked to experiment, to push things to see what could happen. He knew a good deal about mutation, probably more than anyone else, then or now, and he had _theories_.”

Frost paused, tilted her head, and seemed to consider something, turning her thoughts over and over in her mind. She wasn’t blocked off, and Charles could’ve read her mind, easily, but he held back.

He needed to get Raven out safe.

“Shaw thought that mutation came from daemons.”

Charles raised his eyebrows. “Mutation comes from _daemons_?” He brushed Iskierka’s wings automatically.

Emma nodded. “He thought that the daemon was the source of mutation, and when the daemon settled, the mutation would manifest.”

“That’s not possible,” Charles said, shaking his head, even as Alex, Sean, and Erik shifted, their hands going to their daemons. “I was a telepath years before Iskierka settled.”

The teleporter nodded, agreeing with Charles, and his daemon whispered something to him in Russian.

“Same for me,” Hank said. He was studying the records and notes Emma had stolen with interest—not malicious interest, but scientific—stroking his Hesione absentmindedly.

“It’s a flawed theory, sugar,” Emma said with a shrug. “My telepathy was active before Mortimer settled, but my diamond form didn’t come until after. There’s a correlation between daemons and mutations, but I don’t necessarily think that the daemon causes the mutation.”

“What is Dust?” Erik murmured. He too was reading, his face inscrutable and his eyes shadowed by the helmet. Only Aliyah’s eyes, a glowing, hot gold, betrayed his current emotional state—barely suppressed rage. “It’s mentioned in every single record.”

Emma’s face twisted into a frown. “Sebastian’s greatest discovery,” she said. “He found records from the Magisterium, before their fall, and pictures. It appears that early mutants were held by the General Oblation Board—what the people now running the Bolvangar Project call themselves, by the way—for crude testing. One of those tests was a sort of photograph. Here.”

The other telepath pulled several grainy, ancient-looking pictures from under the mess of notes and records. Each picture had two people and their daemons in it, standing side by side. One was clearly human, and the other a mutant with clawed hands and a feral snarl on his face. One person was only a dark, smudged blur, but the other—the mutant—was radiant with light. Thousands of tiny particles flowed from him and his daemom in bright, streaming rivers, winding through them and around them in heaving, intricate patterns.

It was beautiful.

“These particles,” Charles said, awed, “are they Dust?”

Emma dipped her head. “Yes. Ruskanov Particles, technically, but ‘Dust’ is the more common term. The blur there,” she tapped the ancient photo, “is a normal, non-mutated human. The one with all the Dust is a mutant, and his daemon is settled. Dust is only attracted to those who are whole. The severed have no Dust at all.”

She showed them another picture, and this time is was clear; there were two men, and only one daemon. The daemonless man—the mutant—had no daemon, and his claws and snarl were gone. There were no streaming golden particles this time.

Everyone at the table looked away.

Charles shook his head. “This Dust is thought to be the source of mutation, then?”

Frost nodded again. “That’s what the Magisterium thought, and what Sebastian thought later. He theorized that Dust caused mutation, and since the daemonless have no Dust, that daemons must be the source of it, and therefore mutation.”

“Mutation is evolution, though,” Charles argued. “The natural progression of species.”

Emma shrugged. “I don’t particularly care either way,” she said. “Dust or evolution, it doesn’t really matter, does it? They’re cutting us apart anyway.”

Charles frowned, turning this new information over in his head. His inner scientist leaped, jumping at the chance to study this “Dust,” learn about it, test it, and see if it was related to mutation after all.

Iskierka batted him lightly. _Not our concern right now,_ she warned.

Charles nodded. _Yes, yes, of course._

“We have more time than we thought originally,” he said, changing the subject. “Is that correct?”

The three Brotherhood mutants exchanged a glance, and Erik nodded. “I’d prefer not to wait longer than necessary,” he said. “The longer we wait, the greater chance we have of loosing them, and of more being intercised or tortured.”  
The telepath nodded, staring down at the pictures, of the ones lit with rivers of light and the ones dead, blank, ruined.

“A week,” he said. “That’s adequate time to prepare, yes?”

Erik nodded, and steel crept into his eyes. Aliyah sat straight up at his side, her teeth bared momentarily in a glimmering snarl. “A week,” he said. “We’ll make preparations. I’ll return all of yours to you, I promise—”

“Wait a moment,” Charles snapped. “I’m not _staying_ here.”

Erik blinked. “Of course you are,” he said.

Everyone else—including his students, Charles noted, and anger stirred in his chest. Iskierka mantled her wings, and she was suddenly very, very large—turned to stare at the professor, bemused.

“You’ve never wanted to go on a mission before,” Alex said softly. “You’ve always just let us go.”

Hank and Sean nodded. Charles could see that they, at least, were driven by worry for his wellbeing. Iskierka hissed at them anyway.

Azazel’s thoughts were politely condescending, and Emma’s face was impassive but he saw the annoyance in the way her daemon flicked his head.

Erik’s face was in shadow, and Aliyah’s face was as soft and painful as a tiger’s could be, her head bowed.

Charles bit back his anger. “I’m going,” he said flatly. “That’s my _sister_ in there, and my people. I won’t leave them, not like this.”

“What can you do?” said Emma Frost.

He glared. “More than you, telepathy-wise. I don’t have to go in, that’s not what I’m suggesting. But I want to be close, very close, so I can monitor what’s going on and take out threats as you go.”

The children subsided, exchanging tired, anxious glances. Azazel seemed to accept Charles’s plan, and Emma nodded. Erik, though, was gritting his teeth, his hands curled tightly, and the lights flickered and rattled. Charles couldn’t hear him, through the helmet, but he didn’t need to.

“I’ll be fine,” Charles said quietly. “I’ll stay out of your way, and I can help clear doors for you, to minimize casualties.”

Erik met his eyes. “Casualties,” he said hollowly. “Fine. Come, if you must.” He stood abruptly, muscles bunching in his neck, flexing his fingers.

Charles nodded, satisfied, for now. “A week,” he said.

Erik had turned, looking out the window, his hands scattering up dust that billowed around him, fire-gold in the sunlight.

“A week,” he said, and Aliyah snarled something softly in German. The line of Erik’s— _no,_ Iskierka whispered, _Magneto’s_ —shoulders was tense and hard.

A memory hit Charles so hard he couldn’t breathe—

 _(erik, standing out the window, coiled so tight his muscles jumped, and president kennedy’s address was ringing in their ears._

 _“come to bed,” charles whispered, and he scratched aliyah’s ears. she purred at him, but her eyes were fixed on her human, her tail twitching furiously. “erik, come on, you need your rest.”_

 _“in a minute,” erik said, and waved charles away._

 _he never came to bed.)_

His insides knotted and sank, hard and heavy.

 _Iskierka,_ he whispered, and she carded through his hair.

 _I know,_ she said. _I know._  



	4. part three: the rivers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a mountainside, a broken taboo, another revelation, some cleverness, some courage, the rivers of Dust and the old argument.

[ ](http://pics.livejournal.com/zihna/pic/0000672b/)

part three: the rivers

***

“ _What if someone does come?” Sparrow asked. “What if someone tries to attack the Chief? You can’t see them coming. They’ll surprise you, and kill you.”_

 _The Eagle shifted, spreading his huge wings. “I cannot see,” he said, “but that does not mean I cannot hear, or smell, or feel the enemies approaching. No one is going to kill me.”_

 _“Are you sure?”_

 _“Yes,” the Eagle said, when he really just wanted to say no._

***

I.

Hank’s plane touched down, scattering snow, and the engines died.

 _We’re here._

Charles peered out the window, trying to see. Darkness hid the mountainsides, and the dim plane lights lit only a small patch of snow. Out in the mountains, he felt the buzz of dozens of minds, but he couldn’t touch or read them. He frowned.  
Erik and Aliyah were already on their feet, dropping the ramp and prowling out into the gloom.

 _Do you feel anyone?_ Charles thought at Frost.

Her owl ruffled his wings.

 _Yes,_ she said, _but I can’t touch them. I’m being blocked._

Charles nodded. _I am too._

“The base is about a mile away,” Erik said, stepping back into the jet. He wiped snow out of his hair and Aliyah shook herself vigorously.

 _Is there anything else around?_ Iskierka asked. She left her human’s side and settled next to Aliyah’s head.

“Power lines, mostly. Water and sewage pipes. A satellite dish, and a helicopter down at the base.”

“So no other buildings?” Alex stood, adjusting his suit. At his side, Arinna’s eyes glittered brightly.

“No. Just two buildings. One appears to be a barrack, and the larger is most likely the testing site.” Anger made Erik’s voice tight and the fur on Aliyah’s spine spike up.

“So what’s the plan?”

Erik shrugged. _Burn them all,_ Charles heard, and caught those slivers of angry guilt again.

He frowned. _Iskierka?_

“There’s seven of us, including Charles,” Erik said. “If three start on one side, and three on the other, we cover twice as much ground and don’t miss any rooms.”

Alex nodded, rubbing Arinna’s ears thoughtfully. Determination colored his mind. “I’m with you,” he said quietly, firmly. “Me and Banshee are with you.”

For a moment, Charles thought Erik would refuse. Aliyah’s fur bristled, and the plane shuddered, but then the moment passed.

“Very well. Emma, Azazel, you’re with Beast, then.”

Azazel muttered to his wolf in Russian, and Mortimer the owl clacked his beak, but neither argued.

The group of mutants stood, daemons stretching, flexing claws, baring teeth.

“I will get a little closer,” Charles said, calling Iskierka back to him. “See if there’s a device of some sort that’s blocking telepathy. If it’s just one device, I should be able to break through, but I need to _see_ the base.”

Both Arinna and Aliyah growled unhappily, but Alex tugged his lioness’s ear and Erik put a hand over his tigress’s muzzle.

“Close enough to see the base?”

“Yes,” Charles said.

“But not closer.” Hard, flinty light gleamed in Erik’s pale eyes.

Iskierka shifted. _Charles…_

 _Hush, my dear._

“Not closer,” he agreed.

Magneto nodded. “We’ll find a place for you on the mountainside,” he said. “The base isn’t in a valley, exactly, but it is low enough we can find you somewhere to watch and not freeze to death.”

Charles smiled. “Shall we go, then?”

Aliyah growled and bounded down the ramp, tail swishing. Erik followed, and the rest went after him, leaving Hank’s warm, brightly lit jet for the bitter gloom of the mountains.

Snow crunched, and Iskierka hopped onto Charles’s lap, offering him warm feathers.

 _Thank you._

The ramp closed, and suddenly, the light was gone. Snow swirled around the group, and they muffled curses as they bumped into one another, reeling blindly.

“Stop moving,” Erik said, from somewhere ahead. Through the snow, Aliyah’s eyes gleamed faintly. The crunching stopped, and everyone stilled. “Flashlights?”

“Sorry, one second,” Hank muttered, right beside Charles. His claws clacked off the flashlights as he fumbled with them, and then pale, watery light bloomed, shining through the spinning snow.

“Good.” Erik was at the front, his tigress farther ahead, his face sharpened by the flashlight’s shadows. He turned on his heel, following after Aliyah, and the group struggled behind him, with Hank and Hesione taking up the rear.

 _It is a good thing I remembered to have Hank put some traction on these damn things,_ he told Iskierka, more to distract her than anything. She chuffed, and forced her feathers to lie flat.

 _Yes, I suppose it is._ She didn’t say what they both felt; a gentle tug, pulling the metal chair through the snow.

Charles knew what she was thinking. _We said we wouldn’t._

 _If we can’t get inside the compound, we’re going to have to,_ she argued. _You can read his mind. You know what he’s thinking. He wants to destroy the whole place. Can you let him kill dozens of people? Even if they deserve it?_

 _No,_ Charles said, because he couldn’t, not when he or Frost could just wipe the scientist’s minds and leave them alive.

 _We can help. We just have to get in there._

 _I know,_ he murmured, and his heart sank. He couldn’t get down a mountain, not by himself.

 _Azazel will flash you down,_ Emma Frost said, and Charles tried not to startle.

 _Well hello,_ he muttered, a little crossly. _It is polite to announce yourself before browsing someone else’s thoughts, you know._

 _Oh, don’t act all high and mighty, Xavier. I’m trying to help you._

Charles met Emma’s eyes, and her owl hooted.

 _You know what I want to do?_

 _Yes._

 _Why would you help me?_

 _You care about him, sugar. The rest of us can’t stop him, if he loses control. You can._

Charles’s eyebrows rose, and Iskierka clacked her beak, mantling her wings. _You’re worried about Erik losing control?_

 _Intercision is close to him,_ Emma said, and pushed at his mind, warning him back. _I don’t know what he’ll do. But he’ll listen to you._ She smiled, and her owl leapt from her shoulder, soaring through the dark, swirling snow. _So Azazel will get you, and flash you in._

 _Thank you,_ he said, and meant it, and Frost dipped her head and pulled back from his mind.

Iskierka lowered her wings. _Well there you go. We have a way in._

 _Yes,_ Charles said, staring through the snow. _But what will it cost us, I wonder?_

The group continued to follow Aliyah, weaving through the snow, hunching against the rattling wind. The ground began to slope, and somewhere down below, faint, pale green light shone through the gloom.

“There,” Erik said, just loud enough to be a whisper over the wind.

Charles could see it now, a vague dark shape lit by rows of lights. The base was half-buried in the mountainside, protected by rocks and snow. The only way down was to fly, or be teleported by someone like Azazel.

He reached out again, now that he was closer, and tried to get through to the people inside. He felt individual people now, but all details were vague and blurred, crackling, like someone had thrown a staticky blanket over their thoughts.

“I can’t reach them,” he said, frustrated.

“We’ll look for anything that could block you, Prof,” Alex said. “Beast? You know what it could look like?”

Hank shrugged, Hesione scrambling on top of his head. “To block the whole base it’d have to be pretty big.”

Alex nodded. “So, destroy big machines. Sound like a plan?”

“Be careful,” Charles said. Iskierka left his lap, flapping to each of his students’ daemons, nudging them fondly. “Don’t get hurt.”

“Meet you here when we’re done,” Sean promised. “With Raven.”

Charles smiled. “I know.” He turned and looked Erik in the eye. “Be careful,” he repeated. Iskierka landed on Aliyah’s head, and the great tiger rumbled.

 _Don’t try and get revenge. Just get our people out of there. Emma and I will wipe the men’s memories. They won’t remember a thing._

Erik didn’t say anything. He only reached for Azazel, and Alex, and held Charles’s eyes.

Aliyah shook Iskierka loose and touched the white wolf, and then, in a red flash, they were all gone.

Charles felt them reappear for a second below, and then doors blew open, and they plunged under the staticky blanket.

He waited, watching the shadowy base, and Azazel and his wolf reappeared. The mutant offered Charles his hand, and the telepath took it, hanging on to the chair with the other, and Iskierka hopped onto Elvira’s back—

Red light flashed, and his stomach dropped, and then they were in a dim hallway, lights guttering above them.

“Don’t get yourself killed,” Azazel said. “Magneto would kill me.” With the smell of cinnamon, he was gone.

Charles swallowed, and tangled a hand in Iskierka’s smooth feathers. The blanket half-smothered him, but he was closer now, and he felt minds moving around him.

He stared down the expanse of hallway.

 _Well, my dear,_ he said. _Shall we?_

***

 _“Are you afraid now?” the Buzzard sang, drifting lower and lower. The Lion’s blood spilled out into the sand, and he choked and rasped through his ruined throat._

 _“Never,” he snarled._

 _The Buzzard laughed, and raised a sharp, wicked claw. “You sure?”_

***

II.

Azazel dropped them off at the front gate, and vanished with the other three.

Alex swallowed, took a deep breath, felt the sunlight singing in his bones.

“Ready?” he whispered to Arinna. Her claws flexed, digging into the snow.

“Yes,” she hissed, and the light building in her eyes gleamed.

“Good. Hey, Banshee.”

Sean turned, and he bounced on the balls of his feet, clearly nervous, though whether it was the impending fight or Magneto _right fucking there,_ Alex didn’t know. Eínin seemed to be okay, though, fluttering around Sean’s head.

Magneto stood slightly in front of the two younger mutants, head tilted back, gazing through the snowy darkness. His daemon prowled around all of them, growling softly, and Alex could feel _power_ building, sliding like a knife along his back, making Arinna’s fur stand on end.

He didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a choice. Magneto set him on edge, but being there and tense and close enough to stop the guy if he got out of hand was better than not being there and having to pick up the pieces afterwards.

 _I’ll keep him in check, Professor,_ Alex thought. Arinna grumbled in agreement, her eyes never leaving Aliyah’s pacing shape.

Charles didn’t answer. They were under the blanket, then, and Alex reminded himself to blow up any big machines he could find.

“You okay, Banshee?” he murmured, low enough so Magneto wouldn’t hear.

Sean met his eyes, flexing his hands. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I’m good. You?”

Alex grinned. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”

The two young mutants nodded, and Einín fluttered to perch on Arinna’s head.

For several minutes, the three mutants stood in the dark snow, squinting up at the base. Alex and Sean kept shifting from foot to foot, nerves and power stuttering inside them, but Magneto was very still, face unreadable.

It made Alex nervous, but he didn’t say anything.

Finally, Magneto raised both hands, and Aliyah threw back her head, opening her jaws wide—

Her roar punched into the side of the building, blowing metal inward and spilling light out into the murky snow. The wall writhed, chunks of concrete pulverized, and dust billowed. Inside Alex heard shouting and coughing, and he let warmth spread all the way down to his fingertips in anticipation.

Magneto and his tiger prowled through the wreckage, disappearing for a second, and that’s when the screaming started.

“Fuck,” Alex swore, and Arinna bounded ahead, clearing the rubble and roaring, echoing Aliyah. Sean took off, swooping inside, and Alex could only follow.

Inside, the light nearly blinded him. He saw Magneto and Aliyah up ahead, forging their way forward with careless swipes and fearless brutality.

Blood and dead-daemon dust swirled and splattered, and the people, scientists and guards, by the looks of them, choked and fell to the side.

 _He’s killing them!_

“Alex!” Arinna roared, her fur flashing red. “We have to stop him!”

Havok focused, gathering sunlight, but it was hard to reach. He frowned. “Arinna, I can’t feel it—”

She roared, frustrated. “I can, but it’s hard, like I’m being blocked—”  
Magneto flicked a hand, and wires rose to strangle, and blood slashed across the floor.

 _Fuck!_ “Push at it,” he choked, grabbing at the heat in his bones, _pushing_ it, and finally, finally, in buzzed to life in his chest, and he hurled it at the ceiling; concrete and lighting collapsed, blocking a hallway and stopping five big, bulky men in their tracks.

One the other side of the rubble, Alex heard their daemons howling furiously, but he didn’t care. Magneto wouldn’t kill them. He’d done what he told Charles he’d do.

“Banshee!” Alex bellowed, above the shouting and screeching metal. “Hey! Can you feel your power?”

Sean ducked a man’s fist, and his face was flushed and frustrated. “Not really!” He tried to scream, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful as it could be, and the man only winced and kept coming.

“Push it!” Alex bellowed, forcing light up and out again, drawing lines of fire.

Banshee did, and this time his scream cracked lights and dropped the man like a rock.

“Good! Now go look for big machines! I’ll stay with Magneto!”

Sean understood and swooped off, knocking a few men down with a screech before Magneto could butcher them. Sean was good at destroying shit. He had this.

Havok fired off another three blasts, dropping ceilings and hurling men hard enough to knock them out but not enough to kill them. Arinna batted aside dogs, cats, snakes, and wolves, snarling fiercely, eyes glowing red-gold and sunlight fracturing in her fur.

“We’re falling behind!” she cried.

And they were—Magneto was nearly at the end of the hallway, Aliyah even farther, wading their way through destruction as more and more humans, this time armed with guns, rushed to meet him.

“Don’t!” Alex bellowed, trying to warn them off. _Arinna!_

“Stay away!” she roared, in her lion’s voice. Red light flashed down her spine. “Don’t fight!”

But the humans didn’t listen, and hurled themselves at Magneto and Alex like they were invincible.

Alex took them down and left them alive; Charles and Frost could mind-wipe them later. Magneto, though, didn’t, and the younger mutant turned back around just in time to see Aliyah roar and leap, claws outstretched, for a white tiger almost as big as herself—

She sailed over the daemon completely and hit its human square in the chest, claws digging in, and she sank her teeth into the man’s throat—

 _Oh god,_ Alex thought, and blood sprayed. Arinna howled, shocked, and pressed against Alex’s legs, and they only watched as Aliyah pulled her teeth out of the dying man’s throat and leaped at another.

 _They’re breaking the taboo!_ He thought, and his stomach heaved. That was—that was—

“How?” Arinna groaned, and pressed her head into his stomach. Alex grabbed her face and rubbed her ears, and his hands shook.

No one just _shattered_ the taboo like that. No one touched another’s daemon like that, and no daemon touched a human who wasn’t their own like that, to _kill_ —

 _So wrong,_ was all Alex could think, as he watched Magneto and his daemon tear through humans, who were turning and trying to run, now, but were caught by metal and tiger claws. _How can they—Why are they—_

Another man, his eyes wild with fear and hate, charged at Alex and tackled him, slamming him to the ground.

“Monsters,” he spat, and wrapped his fingers around Alex’s throat.

“’rinna,” Alex choked, lashing out, punching every bit of the bigger man he could reach.

His lioness coughed, staggered, and slashed the man’s jackal across the face; the man jerked his head to the side, grip slackening, and Alex surged up—

He grabbed at the sunlight, swearing because it was still hard to reach, and fired it, knocking the man into the wall.

His jackal yelped, and keeled over.

“Good job,” Alex muttered, and looked up. “Oh, shit.”

Magneto was gone. Swearing, the young mutant ran to the end of the hallway, looking down each turn. His heart sank. Blood marked the way Magneto had gone, but the ceiling was collapsed, blocking Alex out.

 _Shit shit shit._

“Go… around,” someone at Alex’s feet whispered, and blood gurgled from his torn throat. The man’s white tiger daemon howled, and pressed her face to his chest. “That way.” He pointed with a blood-soaked hand, and Alex nodded, uncomfortable, and ran.

“Don’t look,” Arinna whispered, as they raced away, and Alex didn’t turn to see the tiger collapse to dust.

  
***

“ _You can’t beat me now,” Man boasted. “I’ve taken everything from you!”_

 _The Jaguar snarled, and his fur glowed moon-white. “You stupid little Man,” he said. “You’ve taken nothing from me at all.”_

***

III.

“Come on,” the scientist snapped, and dragged Raven to her feet.

Her whole body protested, shivering, and Sirion whined, but she got her feet underneath her, and managed to stagger along after the scientist.

Behind them Riptide and Angel were pulled along too, groggy and miserable-looking, but alive, and aware.

Somewhere in the distance, screaming and shouting echoed off the walls, accompanied by thunderous bangs and the rattle-scream of shifting metal.

 _Magneto!_

Raven grinned broadly at her teammates, and Sirion grumbled a soft growl.

Quetz stirred around Angel’s shoulders, and Riptide’s osprey, cradled in his arms, flexed her talons.

“Don’t even think about it,” the scientist snarled ,tightening his grip on Raven’s arm.

She glared.

“Take the others,” the scientist ordered, nodding at the guards. “We don’t have a Guillotine, but there are plenty of knives. Do it the old-fashioned way. Rip them apart.”

“No,” Raven hissed, reaching for them. Fear and fury swam in her eyes, burning away some of the grogginess, and she struggled.

 _Don’t_ , Riptide mouthed, letting himself be pulled away.

 _We’ll be okay_ , Angel added. Her daemon whispered in her ear, his tiny tongue flickering.

The guards pulled them around a corner, and then they were gone.

“Our friends are here,” Raven spat, struggling in the scientist’s grip. Sirion snarled, staggering from side to side, disoriented, exhausted by days of drugs and testing, but _angry_.

“I have enough time,” the scientist replied, and his face was still and cool. “Come.”

Raven pulled, and tried to flicker shapes, but the scientist only tightened his grip and dragged her on through the hallways, farther and farther away from the fighting.

 _Emma!_ Raven shouted, hoping the telepath would hear her. _Emma! Where are you?_

Emma did not reply, and the scientist shoved her through an open door into a huge, dome-shaped room.

Raven and Sirion staggered, forced into the very center of the floor, and the scientist prowled to a panel on the side. The room was enormous and dark, lined with flashing tools and control panels like a plane, and on a tray off to the side, several long, sharp silver knives gleamed. Raven didn’t like the look of them.

The scientist’s lizard daemon crept from under his shirt collar, blinking her beady eyes.

“My friends are going to kill you,” Raven said, and wound her fingers in Sirion’s brilliant white fur. And Magneto would, with a vengeance.

“My work will never die.”

Raven blinked.

“The mutant Magneto will kill me,” the scientist said. His daemon did not move. “But my work will live on.”

“We’ll take everything you have here.”

The scientist grinned. “The book is not here.”

 _Siri…_

“What book?”

“The Book of Dust,” the scientist sang, and his face was alight with wicked, knowing glee. “The book of your kind, and the Dust that torments you, and how to save you from it.”

 _A book_?

“You’ve talked about Dust before,” Raven said.

“See for yourself,” the man hummed, and flicked a switch. At once, the room began to creak and groan, the ground shuddering under Raven’s feet. The air sharpened, grew sweet and acrid, and her head spun.

Sirion roared, fearless even though his fur shook.

“Siri,” she gasped, reaching for him, and her daemon leaped, pressing huge paws to her shoulders and nuzzling her neck, purring softly, desperately.

“Are we going to die?” he whispered.

Her fingers shook. “I think so.”

“I’m sorry I never settled for you,” he murmured, eyes fierce and liquid and sad. “I know you wanted me to, but I can’t, I couldn’t—”

“Sirion,” Raven choked, and held him tight, so tight, like she was trying to pull him back into her soul, where nothing could hurt him again. “Sirion, it isn’t your fault.”

“It is—”

“No,” Raven said, and looked him in the eye. “No, Sirion. I don’t want you to settle. You’re perfect the way you are. Don’t ever stop, understand? You make me—”

She stopped. “Mutant. Mutant and proud.”

He laughed, and it splashed like a roar. “Yes. Mutant and proud.”

The creaking, groaning room quieted, and Raven braced herself for a death blow, holding her Sirion close. His fur was soft underneath her fingers.

Light, high above and brilliant, flared, and she heard the scientist hiss out a breath.

She opened her eyes.

Light hung around her in wavering, glittering strands, bright and flowing, weaving between her and her daemon, in them, around them.

It was beautiful.

The strands swirled, clouding around her, spreading out in shimmering rays, and the thick, brilliant strand connecting her heart to Sirion’s glowed.

“ _This_ is Dust?” she breathed. “Siri, it’s amazing.”

He roared, laughing, and flickered shapes experimentally, dog-bird-rabbit-cat-snake. With each change the ribbons of Dust swarmed around him and glowed white-gold, a cloud of shifting, swirling light.

Raven laughed and changed herself, diving through shape after shape, watching Dust grow and collect around her.

“How can anyone think this is wrong?” she breathed, running her fingers through the strands. She couldn’t feel them, but they parted for her, hanging around her like a blanket.

“They’re jealous,” Sirion murmured, still changing, and the Dust shimmered and shivered around him. “Look. _He_ doesn’t have any Dust.”

Raven looked, and sure enough the scientist was Dustless, standing with his blinking daemon alone in the dark, while Raven was lit up with a hundred swirling strands.

The scientist eyed her, and in his hand he had a gleaming silver knife.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” the scientist said. “You’ve never known life without all this Dust clogging you up. You might think it’s pretty, and that it makes you special, but it isn’t normal.”

The knife— _scalpel_ , she realized—gleamed. They didn’t have a Guillotine, but he said there were other ways.

“Yes,” he sang, waving the scalpel. His daemon stirred, twisting her shimmering head. “I don’t have a Guillotine, but all it takes is a cut. This will hurt more, of course. I wanted to wait. You have more Dust than anyone I’ve ever seen. But you won’t have to worry, after this.”

His eyes were absurdly soft.

“Is that what you told the others?” she hissed, and Sirion snarled.

The scientist shrugged. “Wouldn’t you like him to settle? He could even keep that shape, if you want. It is impressive.”  
Raven looked down at her daemon. She loved this shape. He was beautiful like this, all grace and pride and power, sleek and strong, more beautiful than Mortimer, or Iskierka, or even Aliyah. She loved him like this.

But she loved his other shapes, too, the ruby snake, the golden monkey, the clever fox. Sirion was a beautiful jaguar, but he was a beautiful rabbit, too, and a hawk, and a dog.

She wouldn’t make him settle. He wouldn’t be _her_ Sirion anymore.

Raven tangled her fingers in his fur, watching it shift white to black and back again. His claws grew and sharpened, scratching the floor, and the Dusts heaved around them, an ocean tying them together.

 _I will never let them settle you,_ she said to him, and he blinked fierce, shifting eyes up at her.

 _Then we’ll kill them,_ he growled.

The scientist straightened his spine, raising the silver scalpel, and his daemon grinned, revealing dozens of tiny, sharp teeth.

“Never,” Raven said. The Dust around her trembled. “I will _never_ let you destroy us like that.”

The man sighed. “My daemon’s name is Cittagazzè. You will thank us, later.”

 _Don’t let him sever this one,_ Sirion said, flicking a clawed paw at the thick golden strand leading from his heart to hers.

 _I won’t._

The scientist raised his knife, and the Dust-light gleamed off the blade. “You will thank me,” he said, and charged.

 

***

 _“You must be very brave, then,” the Sparrow said, admiring._

 _The Eagle smiled bitterly. “Or very, very stupid.”_

***

IV.

The hallways were deathly quiet, and it made Charles nervous. He could feel fuzzy minds moving in other hallways, and farther out his children’s and the Brotherhood’s, but still, the still hallway made his heart pound and Iskierka’s feathers stand up.

“I don’t like this,” he muttered. Iskierka took off, sailing down the hall, ducking into rooms. Even her mind was blurred to him, distant and hard to read. It was incredibly disconcerting, because she was his _daemon_ —he was supposed to be able to hear her as clearly as he could hear his own thoughts.

 _At least she’s not closed off to me._

 _These are all empty,_ she said, her voice echoing inside his head oddly. _There’s nothing here._

 _Keep checking,_ Charles pushed at her, fighting the crackling static in their connection. _The sooner we find whatever is disrupting my telepathy, the sooner we stop unnecessary bloodshed._

And there was bloodshed, Charles felt it. Erik and Aliyah were tearing a path through the building, and minds winked out all around them.

Charles hated it. Rationally, he knew _why_ Erik was doing it—vengeance, for those who had been severed, and that furious guilt the telepath could taste like saltwater swirling in Erik’s thoughts—but emotionally, morally, he hated it. If his telepathy was free, he could easily dip into minds and erase all the knowledge of mutants and intercision. No one had to die.

 _Charles,_ Iskierka called, breaking him out of his thoughts. A thunderous explosion rocked the base, and minds turned fear-white. _There’s something here._

He immediately moved towards his daemon, into a room near the end of the hallway. It was dark, but cleaner than all the others, and a table with various mechanical tools stood pressed against the wall. Clearly, someone was using the room.

 _Here._ Iskierka sat on top of a big, spinning machine. It looked sort of like a generator, and electrical wires ran from it into the wall. _Could this be it?_

“Perhaps.” Charles didn’t know much about engineering, but the machine was fairly large—could it be disrupting his telepathy, somehow?

“How do we turn it off?”

Iskierka shrugged, lofting up to circle the machine. _Pull all the wires out?_

“And blow ourselves up in the process,” Charles muttered thoughtfully. He wheeled closer to the generator, and looked at the tools on the table. “Perhaps stick a screwdriver in it? Jam the insides?”

 _And definitely blow ourselves up,_ Iskierka said, but scooped a screwdriver up in her talons anyway. _Get as far down the hallway as you can. I’ll follow you._

Charles did so, rolling around the corner and hopefully out of a blast radius, if there was one.

 _Farther,_ Iskierka said.

He winced, and kept moving, and this time he felt the strain of pulling away from her, stretching and pulling deep inside, and he fought off waves of nausea and fear. _Go,_ he told his daemon.

He felt more than heard Iskierka shove the screwdriver into the generator’s guts, and then she was rushing back to him, dropping into his lap and pressing her head into his neck.

He clutched at her tightly, holding her close, and behind them, the generator let out a loud, cracking groan, and all the lights in the hallway went out.

At once, Charles felt some of the static flare up and fizzle out, and his connection to other minds sharpened. Static still blocked him from many minds, but he found Alex’s and forced his way through, wincing at the telepathic shock.

 _Alex,_ he said.

 _Prof? You can read me?_

 _Sort of._ He pressed the image of the generator into his student’s mind. _This is what is blocking me—I don’t know how—but there are several of them. Destroy as many as you can._

 _Got it,_ Alex said, and through him Charles felt a pulse of sunlight and heard the ceiling crack underneath it. _Prof, you’ve gotta stop Magneto, we lost him, but he’s ripping them apart—_

 _I know,_ Charles said heavily. _You lost him? Where did he go?_

 _Dunno, he got ahead of us, sealed the hall behind him. We’re trying to find him again._ Fear and anger and disgust boiled in the young mutant’s mind. _His daemon—Aliyah—she’s—she’s_ killing _people._

Charles saw a flash of dusty orange fur and flashing teeth, and Aliyah surged from Erik’s side to sink her fangs in a man’s throat, ripping, ripping—

And killing a human herself, without her power, _touching_ him, breaking the taboo—

 _She’s furious,_ Iskierka whispered, her voice sharp and clear in Charles’s head. _She’s breaking the taboo to kill them._

Charles didn’t know what that meant, for Erik. The two had never been one for convention, of course, and the concentration camps had damaged them, and their bond, but for Erik, throwing his _soul_ out to kill these people?

 _I cannot touch Erik’s mind yet,_ Charles said. _He’s under another generator. Find him. I’ll try on my end._

 _Got it,_ Alex said, and went back to fighting and blasting his way through walls.

“This is bad,” Charles muttered, dragging a hand through his hair. Iskierka took off again in agitation, distressed, angry sounds spilling from her beak.

 _We have to find them,_ she said. _Now. We have to find them_ now.

“I know.”

Charles reached out, feeling Erik’s mind under the static sea. He was near the center of the swirling minds, and hard to even identify, but he was there, and Charles quickly cast out for a nearby person.

He found a man, a scientist, and brought him over.

Within a few moments the man and his daemon, a magpie, were standing blank-eyed in front of Charles.

 _Take us to the center of the building,_ he ordered, pressing down. The man gave a jerky nod and took the chair, pushing Charles through the hallways.

They passed by most of the main fighting; Alex and Sean were still trying to reach Erik, and Hank and the Brotherhood were on the opposite end. Erik was still too static-coated to reach, and Charles couldn’t find Raven’s thoughts _anywhere,_ which terrified him, but he felt Angel and Riptide, and they were fine and sowing destruction some hallways over.

 _Be okay,_ he sent into the static, even though Raven couldn’t hear him. _Please, please be okay._

The scientist guided Charles along, and they met mutants—dozens of them, oh god—running away from the noise, pale-faced and scared. Their daemons clung to their shadows, but they were _whole,_ at least, and with a nudge Charles sent them in the direction of the mountains, to find a cave and wait there. He couldn’t soothe their fears yet, but they’d be safe.

The hallways got brighter again, and the static swelled; they were under another generator, and Charles didn’t have time to find it.

The man pushing him faltered, and Charles frowned, digging in and pressing. Iskierka, once again fuzzy and distant, soared up and ahead, towards the screech of shifting metal and the thick, staticky center.

 _Come on, come on,_ he thought. They were passing bodies now, and some of them were dead and others badly wounded, covered in gashes and bites or bristling with metal.

 _Come on!_

“Here you are,” the man said placidly, and stopped in front of a hallway that had only two doors. “First intercision station. Would you like to visit the second station?”

 _Two intercision stations,_ he thought, and felt sick.

“Wait here,” he ordered, will all the force he could muster, shoving the thought through the static. “We will go to the next station later. Where is it?”

“East Wing.”

 _So farther from us. No, Erik is here._

The trail of bodies clearly said so.

Charles rolled himself to the first door, and cautiously turned the handle, pushing it open. It was a fairly big room, well-lit, and another generator buzzed in the corner. In the center, a half-completed silver cage, separated by what would soon be a blade, gleamed. There was old, dried blood on the floor.

Erik was not inside, and Charles quietly closed the door.

 _This is where…_ Iskierka cried, and landed on his shoulder hard enough to hurt.

 _Yes._

He moved to the second door, the only place Erik could be, and pushed it open.

  
***

“ _I took the sun away from you!” the Man screamed. “I took the stars!”_

 _Jaguar smiled, and his fur rippled in the different lights, yellow, black, white. “Did you?” he said, and bared his teeth, and his shadow spilled behind him._

***

V.

Raven tore down the hallway, Sirion bounding beside her, and tried not to be sick.

They were alive. They were alive, and mostly whole, and that was all that mattered. During their brief fight, the scientist had managed to cut some of their Dust away, but not their heart-strand. So they hurt, and changing shape was painful, but they were _whole._

“We’re alive,” Sirion murmured, over and over. “We’re alive, Raven, we’re alive.”

She nodded, and kept running. They were alive, and they could fully change, now, flickering shape to shape effortlessly and without any pain. The drugs, or whatever had been limiting their powers before, was gone.

These hallways were dark. She’d left the light behind her, in the Dust-room, and Raven couldn’t see the brilliant strands now, and she couldn’t feel them, but she _knew_ they were there and their presence comforted her.

“Which way?” Sirion said, stopping at an intersection.

“Towards the sound of the fighting.” And they heard the fighting. It was damn near impossible not to. Their friends were here, and now that they were free, and they could change form easily, they wanted to _fight._

And forget what they’d done, but Raven didn’t say that. She didn’t need to. Sirion knew.

“We did what we had to do,” he murmured. “He was going to hurt us. We’ve killed before.”

“Yes,” she said, and tried to mean it. “I know.”

They kept running, and Sirion’s fur flashed brightly in the dark. Up ahead they saw thick smoke and faint pricks of light, and they heard shouting and the sounds of fighting.

“Ready?”

“Always,” her daemon said, and roared tremendously, furiously.

They exploded into a larger, smoke-clogged hallway, and Raven nearly fell over in surprise.

Hank stood in the middle of the wreckage, bashing aside men easily with his huge, furred paws, and his little lemur daemon clawed and bit.

“Hank,” Raven said, and gaped.

The blue-furred mutant straightened and met her eyes, and his fur bristled, whether from anger or agitation she didn’t know.

“Raven,” he said, voice very soft for such a huge body, and she couldn’t help but smile.

“Why are you here? How’d you get here? They didn’t capture you too, did they? They didn’t attack the mansion?”

“No, we weren’t—we weren’t attacked. Magneto came and got us.”

“ _Erik?_ ” she asked. _I thought he said he’d never go back there,_ she mused. Sirion shrugged his broad shoulders.

 _Desperate times._

“All of you? You’re all here?”

Hank nodded jerkily, and Hesione returned to his shoulder.

Raven smiled, and she knew she shouldn’t still think of these people as _friends,_ but she was happy to see them. They had come for her, all of them.

And then her heart sank. Charles was here. Charles would _know_ what she’d done, all the people she’d hurt and killed since siding with Erik.

She didn’t want him to know.

Sirion shifted, bouncing onto her shoulder as a tabby cat, purring gently. “It’s time,” he said, and she wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. “Raven, it’s time.”

“Thank you,” she told Hank, and meant it. “Thank you for coming to get me.”

He almost smiled, and ducked his head. Sirion leaped down to meet Hesione, and the two daemons touched noses gingerly.

“Where’s everyone else?”

“We split up. Havok and Banshee are with Magneto, and Frost and Azazel are around here somewhere.”

“Right here, actually,” Emma said, coming around the corner. She glittered, and her diamond face was carved into a smile. “Mystique.”

“Emma.”

“You are alive,” Azazel said, pleased, and his wolf yipped. “Good. Magneto and the telepath do not have to worry, then.”

“Charles? Is he here?”

“He’s on the mountain,” Hank said quickly. Emma’s eyes flashed. “We left him there so he could help, if he needed to.”

“He should be able to reach us now,” Emma said lightly. “At least parts, anyway. The more generators we destroy, the better it gets.”

Raven nodded, relieved that at least Charles was safe, and close by.

 _But he’ll know what I’ve done…_

“Angel and Riptide are coming this way,” Frost continued, and Mortimer hooted from her shoulder. “Shall we meet them?”

Hank looked decidedly uncomfortable, but Sirion gave Hesione a playful nudge and the fur on his shoulders relaxed.

Raven grinned. Everyone was okay. Everyone was alright, and they were going to get out of here. She let her power ripple down to her hands, and Sirion leaped back, flowing into the jaguar shape and shaking himself vigorously.

Emma’s face curved into a wicked, gleaming smile. “Shall we?”

Raven looked down at her daemon, who could change shape easily, effortlessly, and who would never settle, no matter how much she wanted him to.

But she didn’t want him to, not anymore. Sirion was Sirion, the way he was, and she was Raven, and sometimes Mystique. They were themselves, and it didn’t matter that they could change and wouldn’t settle, because Emma could turn to diamonds, Hank was blue, Erik was a magnet, and Charles read minds.

She understood, now, that a daemon was a daemon, no matter what form it took.

Sirion met her eyes, and she felt the roar building in his throat.

“Which way?” she said, and Emma pointed down the hall.

Raven and her Sirion turned, and, with a roar echoing behind them, surged to join the fight.

  
***

 _“Brave Eagle,” said the Chief, and he had an arrow behind his back. “I thank you, for all your courage towards my people. We are grateful. You have saved us.”_

 _The Eagle inclined his head. “Are you here to kill me, Chief?”_

 _The Chief smiled, and he was crying. “Yes.” And he drove the arrow into the Eagle’s breast. “Dream and see again, my brother.”_

***

VI.

Erik stood in the center of the room, and light heaved around him. Dust—it had to be Dust—hung in ropes, dripping from his fingers, blooming from his chest, rising from the earth, winding between him and Aliyah.

Charles breathed out, and wheeled into the huge, dome-shaped room, and couldn’t take his eyes off of Erik.

“That’s Dust,” he murmured, and Erik started, looking up.

He saw Charles and he _smiled,_ and stretched out a Dusty hand.

“Come here,” he said, and Aliyah purred. The Dust spun lazily around her, and she hummed a tiger-song.

Charles came, and Iskierka dropped to land next to Aliyah, and then the telepath noticed the Dust around her.  
Golden light filtered through Iskierka’s feathers and circled her head, and a thick, glimmering strand of it wound from her chest all the way to Charles’s. He traced its path, touched his chest, where the Dust went in. He couldn’t feel it, and it separated for his fingers and flowed into him anyway.

He looked around himself and there was Dust, fanning out, and Erik grinned and ran a hand through it.

Charles laughed. “This is Dust.”

“Yes,” Erik said, and he was grinning wildly, like Charles’s hadn’t seen for _years,_ and Aliyah roared and leaped up, letting the Dust spin and part for her.

“I’d never seen it,” Magneto continued. “I’d heard a little about it, from Shaw, but he didn’t know exactly what it was back then, just that the old Church tried to destroy it—”

In this room, Charles’s telepathy worked a little better—he didn’t know if it was the concentration of Dust, or what—and he jabbed out with it, darting into Erik’s mind and pulling on that thread of angry guilt he’d felt, pulsing and swirling and driving Aliyah to leap and kill.

He found a memory, and it was blood-soaked and gleaming, but he held onto it anyway and looked inside.

His stomach turned, and he put it back.

Erik’s eyes flashed, and Aliyah’s purr dropped into a soft, aborted growl.

“Erik,” Charles said, and stopped.

“You saw it?”

“Yes.”

Erik’s face twisted, and he held onto his Aliyah. “I built the first Silver Guillotine,” he said hollowly, “when I was fourteen years old and there was less than a week left in the war.”

Charles didn’t say anything, and chose to watch the brilliant ribbons of Dust.

“Shaw told me how, and promised me that if I built it for him, I could see Aliyah. I had not seen her for nearly a year. I knew what it was. I knew what it was for. And I built it anyway, because I wanted to see my daemon.”

Aliyah growled, and pressed up against him, and Charles thought _it makes sense, now, why they sometimes act like two separate beings, instead of halves of a whole._

“He took it with him, when he ran. I doubt it survived to Argentina, but,” Erik shrugged, and dust spilled from his shoulders.

“My Guillotine was used to make the others.” _I made intercision_ easy.

 _No you didn’t,_ Charles wanted to say. “It isn’t your fault,” he said instead. “You were a child, and you wanted your daemon. That’s not your fault.”

Erik’s bitter, hard smile didn’t go away. “Then I was weak.”

“Wanting your daemon made you weak?” Charles asked, incredulous, and Iskierka clacked her beak.

Magneto and Aliyah shared a glance. “Yes,” she said.

“It made you _human,_ ” the telepath argued. “It made you a _child_ in a terrible situation.”

Erik spread his hands, and Charles noticed for the first time that they were bloody, and so were Aliyah’s fangs and paws. “I did this.” His mind howled, guilt and rage spinning like a fanged hurricane.

 _I killed them. I killed_ all _of them, by creating the cutter._

“You killed a lot of people today, you know,” Charles said quietly. “You and Aliyah. You broke the taboo to kill them.”

Erik’s eyes gave nothing away. _They ripped out my people’s souls. It is only fitting that mine killed them._

 _You didn’t have to kill them,_ Charles forced through, and Iskierka unwillingly mantled her wings. _You didn’t have to kill_ any _of them. I would have wiped their minds clean!_

“And would that have worked? There are no severed ones here, but what about the others? What about the ones we found in Alaska? What would you have done if we came and Raven was intercised?”

Charles stopped, because he didn’t know.

“I would not have killed them,” he said, fiercely. “I would have—I would have—”

“Let them go?” Erik said, and it was a sigh. “Of course you would have. You’re a good person.”

Iskierka cried out, and launched from the ground, slamming into Erik’s chest and instantly his arms came around her to hold her up—

Light flashed, and Charles couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t think through the hundred thousand threads of thought and love and rage and grief and pain and wantwant _want_ —

Aliyah pressed her face into his chest, licking his face, purring, whiskers tickling, and his hands disappeared into her fur, holding her close and tight.

She purred, and he felt the sound through his soul.

“You’re an idiot,” Iskierka said, from Erik’s arms, her voice dusty with three years of disuse. “You’re an idiot, you’re an _idiot_ —”

Charles couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t want to. He held Erik’s daemon, and Erik held his, and the Dust around and between them flashed and flared with starbursts of white.

“This is Dust,” he said, again and again, because it was beautiful and complete, and they were lit with it. “This is what it means, to be a mutant. We’re _beautiful,_ Erik, but we’re human too. All these people here, they’re not good people, but you don’t have to kill them.

“They think you are a monster, because you have _this_ and they do not. Don’t prove them right. Don’t kill anyone else here.”

Erik was silent, and Charles heard his heart beat through Iskierka’s ears.

“Why do you protect them?”

“Because not all of them are evil. Not all of them want to kill us.” He thought of Moira and her Zev, who just wanted to be with them, to protect them. “Not all of them deserve your hatred.”

Erik sighed heavily, and gently put Iskierka back on the floor. “Aliyah.”

The tigress whined, and Charles couldn’t help it; he held her tighter, and the Dust flashed and spun.

“Aliyah,” Erik said.

Iskierka keened, and tore into the air, scattering Dust as she mourned. It followed in her wake like trails of fire, and Charles hurt, but he let Aliyah go.

“It’s alright,” he whispered to her, and her face was fractured, but she padded back to her Erik’s side.

Iskierka returned to Charles’s shoulder, and they stood, together and apart, with Dust thrumming between them.

 _Xavier,_ Frost said, punching through the static shield. _We have Mystique. We have everyone. Everyone is alive._

 _Thank you,_ Charles said, and his heart leaped, and he wanted to sing out to Raven, and looked at Erik. “We have Raven. She is alright. Whole.”

Erik nodded, bowing his head. “Then,” he said carefully, and Aliyah’s pained growl rattled in the room, “I suppose we have no other purpose here. Wipe their minds, and we can go.”

It was a peace offering, and Charles smiled, even though he felt ragged and empty, and missed the flashing Dust. He reached out, and Alex and Sean had taken out more generators; the static field was light now.

 _Forget what you have done,_ he said, and they did. Not too far from this Dust-room, men fell asleep and forgot their purpose, and Erik was reaching out too, Dust contracting around him.

The walls shook, and Charles knew he was destroying everything he could find.

The lights flickered, and for a second, they lost sight of their Dust.

“Azazel will come for us,” Charles said.

Erik nodded, and offered his hand. Dust spilled in rivers from his palms, like fire, like blood, like love and his power, and Charles took it, and their Dust flashed once, brightly.

“If this happens again,” he said softly, warningly.

Charles nodded. “If this happens again, you may kill them all.”

The Dust wove around them in brilliant rivers, and Erik cupped Charles’s face and Aliyah nuzzled Iskierka, and they watched the Dust-sparks snap and crackle.

The room shook under Erik’s power.

There was the sharp tang of cinnamon, and a hand on Charles’s shoulder, and then they were gone.


	5. epilogue: in each place and forever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are old men, again.

_Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow_   
_kind, perhaps in the nook_

 _of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed_   
_anyone. Here I have_   
_two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back_   
_to rest my cheek against,_

 _your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish._   
_My hands are webbed_   
_like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed_   
_something in the womb_

 _but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds_   
_or a life I felt_   
_passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly_   
_she had to scream out._

 _Here when I say "I never want to be without you,"_   
_somewhere else I am saying_   
_"I never want to be without you again." And when I touch you_   
_in each of the places we meet_

 _in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying_   
_and resurrected._   
_When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,_   
_in each place and forever._

  
[ ](http://pics.livejournal.com/zihna/pic/00008rdd/)

  
epilogue: in each place and forever

They leaned back, two old men, an eagle and a tiger, and waited together.

Erik will not be intercised; he had plans to escape. Charles won’t know this, because he didn’t want to, and he wouldn’t look for it.

Outside the guards and scientists and psychologists were panicking, because Charles was touching Aliyah and Erik was touching Iskierka, and neither man was howling or fighting in pain.

Erik smiled, a flash of old mischief and tired, time-worn affection. His hand was heavy and warm on Iskierka’s back, and he carded through her feathers gently, fondly, remembering all their old patterns and rhythms like he’d never forgotten them.

Aliyah purred in Charles’s lap, head heavy, and her fur was coarse and familiar. Both of his hands were vanishing into her fur, knotted with veins and age, and contentment, like rivers of Dust, thrummed between the four of them, man to daemon and all around again.

Charles felt, in each of these places where they met, the Dust growing and swelling, and he heard memory whisper, and he was old, he was very old, but he was content.

Iskierka leaned into Erik’s hands, and Aliyah into Charles’s, and the two old men waited together, in each place and forever, for someone to come and pull them apart.

They smiled, and waited, and the Dust grew.

  


[ ](http://pics.livejournal.com/zihna/pic/000077gr/)   



End file.
